^ 

LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 


] 


SAN  DIEGO 


The  Choosing  of  the  Apostles 


YOUR  NEIGHBOR 

^ 

AND  YOU 


BY    THE 


REV.   EDWARD  F.   GARESCHE,  S.J. 


"  If  then  you  fulfil  the  royal  law,  according 
to  the  Scriptures,  Thou  shall  love'thy  neighbor 
as  thusclf;  you  do  well." — St.  James,  II..  8. 


THE  QUEEN'S  WORK  PRESS 

ST.  LoT7is,  Mo. 

SECOND  EDITION 


Smprimt  pot(0i. 

ALEXANDER  J.  BURROWES,  SJ. 

Vice  Proolnclolii  Praeft.  Proo.  Missourianoe. 

Niljtt  0J»0tat. 

REMIGIUS  LAFORT,  S.T.D., 

Censor. 

3fraprimattur. 

JOANNES   CARDINALIS   FARLEY, 

A  rcbiepiscopus  Neo-Eboracemii. 

NKO-EBORACI, 
die  9  Decembris,  1912 


TO 
MY  FATHER  AND  MOTHER 


PREFACE 

These  ailicles  have  for  the  most  part  ap- 
peared in  the  pages  of  the  Messenger  of  the 
Sacred  Heart.  Some  have  been  published  in 
America,  The  Sacred  Heart  Review,  The 
Magnificat,  Extension,  Men  and  Women,  and 
the  Rosary.  Though  written  at  different  times, 
they  group  themselves — and  by  design — 
around  one  central  theme,  for  they  deal  with 
those  two  greatest  of  all  realities  after  God 
Himself,  to  wit:  your  neighbor  and  you. 

Their  appeal  is  meant  to  be  a  wide  one, 
indeed,  the  thoughts  they  dwell  on  are  for  all 
earnest  and  sincere  Catholic  men  and  women. 
Desires  often  come  to  all  of  us  to  rise  to 
nobler  and  better  ways  of  living,  to  make  more 
of  our  lives  both  for  our  neighbor  and  our- 
selves. But  when,  and  where,  and  how  to 
begin  our  efforts  often  seems  difficult  and 
obscure.  For  Religious,  there  are  many 
manuals  of  holy  living,  for  the  layman  there 
are  comparatively  few;  fewer  still  deal  with 
life  as  it  is  lived  at  our  present  time.  These 
papers  are  only  a  partial  and  feeble  effort  to 
supply  this  want  and  to  suggest  to  Catholics 
some  at  least  of  the  everyday  and  easy  ways 


in  which  they  may  aid  both  themselves  and 
their  fellow-men. 

Certain  questions  and  issues  otherwise  very 
timely  and  important — such  as  political  activ- 
ity, the  wide  fields  of  social  work,  and  all  the 
rest — are  only  hinted  at  in  passing.  In  a 
larger  and  more  pretentious  book  they  would 
be  indispensable,  but  their  absence  will  readily 
be  pardoned  here. 

Finally,  if  something  has  been  sacrificed  to 
emphasis,  to  interest,  and  clearness ;  if  there 
is  a  dwelling  on  the  obvious  with  many  repeti- 
tions, and  a  touch  of  old-fashioned  familiarity 
towards  the  gentle  Reader,  all  these  things 
will  be  condoned,  we  trust,  in  view  of  the 
humble  and  practical  purpose  of  this  little 
book.  It  was  written  (a  labor  of  love)  in  the 
between-whiles  of  busy  days;  and  it  is  meant 
to  be  read  in  like  manner,  little  by  little,  in 
quiet  moments,  or  in  your  weary  or  your 
leisure  hours. 


CONTENTS 

THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF  SPEECH 1 

THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF  CONSISTENCY 12 

"Nor  RIGGED  TO  DO  IT" 21 

OUR  TALK  AT  HOME 30 

THE  COMMON   CATHOLIC 42 

THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF  ENCOURAGEMENT    ....  56 

THE  POWER  OF  PRAISE 71 

OUR  TALK  IN  BUSINESS 87 

WEARING  A  CATHOLIC  FACE 97 

FOOLS'   GOLD 109 

X 

THE  ETHICS  OF  SATURDAY  NIGHT 121 

THE    POOR — OUR    CREDITORS 128 

OUR  HOLIER  SELVES 135 

THE  BURNING  QUESTION 142 

LAYMEN'S  RETREATS 147 

A  COMMONPLACE  WONDER 161 

ONE  ASPECT  OF  OUR  PUBLIC  LIBRARIES    ....  165 
A  SUMMER  OPPORTUNITY    .  ....  175 


THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF  SPEECH 

WE  say  a  great  deal  now-a-days,  and 
very  rightly,  too,  about  the  Apostle- 
ship  of  the  Press,  but  what  of  the 
Apostleship  of  Speech?  For  the  Press, 
mighty  and  far-reaching  as  it  is,  has,  we  all 
know,  its  own  peculiar  limitations  and  needs 
a  complement.  Many  of  us  can  not  write, 
many  lack  the  time  or  inclination,  and  even 
when  it  is  duly  sent  forth,  the  printed  page 
is  never  quite  sure  of  its  audience.  This 
man  will  not  read  except  for  amusement, 
the  other  distrusts  whatever  savors  of  the 
supernatural,  a  third  is  steeled  beforehand 
against  anything  which  hints  of  Catholicity, 
or  the  Church. 

But  the  kindly,  spontaneous  speech  of  man 
to  man  is  easy  and  common  to  us  all.  It 
murmurs  everywhere,  on  the  car,  on  the 
street,  in  offices  and  homes,  kindling  its  own 
interest,  winning  attention,  appealing  to 
everyone,  in  spite  of  his  prejudices  and  his 
inclinations.  It  opens  an  easy  way  for  that 
genial  interchange  of  personal  opinion,  of 
question  and  answer,  of  objection  and  reply, 
which  clears  and  recommends  as  nothing 
1 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

else   can,    one's   true   beliefs,   and    principles 
and  points  of  view. 

Of  course,  no  one  now-a-days  would 
praise  mere  controversy,  or  polemics.  Heaven 
forbid !  That  odious  and  ugly  wrangling 
over  sacred  truths,  which  only  adds  stub- 
bornness to  each  man's  conviction,  is  happily 
out  of  mode.  But  we  are  in  danger  of  going 
to  the  other  extreme  and  following  the 
indifferentism  of  the  age  so  far  that  we 
carefully  avoid  every  mention  of  sacred 
things. 

This  cruel  kindness  and  complaisance  we 
are  guilty  of  sometimes  even  to  our  dearest 
and  nearest  friends.  Cruel  one  must  call  it, 
because  we  are  keeping  from  them,  by  our 
silence,  the  very  truths  and  principles  which 
we  hold  as  our  dearest  and  most  precious 
possession  in  this  world.  If  a  readiness  to 
share  one's  money  and  influence  and  oppor- 
tunities is  looked  for  between  friends,  how 
much  more  should  there  be  a  frank  and 
willing  communication  of  those  eternal  truths 
which  enrich  and  ennoble  a  man's  immortal 
soul.  Yet,  if  we  treated  one  another  in 
matters  of  dollars  and  cents  as  we  do  in 
issues  of  the  soul's  salvation,  some  of  us 
would  have  few  friends  left  in  the  world. 
2 


The  Apostleship  of  Speech 

Once,  in  the  murmur  and  clatter  of  a 
crowded  street-car,  an  angry  voice  rose  over 
the  hum  of  city  noises:  "You  knew  the  firm 
was  going  under,"  it  shouted  in  ungovernable 
fury,  "and  let  me  go  ahead  with  the  deal." 
A  moment's  pause  followed,  in  which  one 
might  imagine  a  murmured  reply.  "You 
knew  I  was  in  for  losing,  and  you  were  on 
the  right  side,  and  you  didn't  say  a  word!" 
cried  the  voice  again.  "You  cur!  That  may 
be  your  idea  of  friendship,  but  it  isn't  mine ; 
don't  talk  to  me  again!" 

The  angry  man  was  right.  That  was  no 
true  friend  who  let  him  stake  his  money  on 
a  rotten  venture  and  never  said  a  word. 
Heaven  grant  that  our  own  friends  may  not 
have  cause  to  hurl  a  like  reproach  at  us  on 
the  Judgment  Day! 

I  remember  still  the  regretful  pathos  with 
which  a  dear  old  gentleman,  who  in  the 
thoughtlessness  of  youth  had  entered  into 
associations  which  kept  him  from  his  religious 
duties,  told  me  of  the  strange  silence  which 
everyone  kept  towards  him  on  that  one 
subject  of  which  he  had  most  need  to  hear. 
"There  was  So-and-so,"  said  he,  "a  good 
Catholic,  and  a  firm  friend  of  mine,  but  he 
never  said  the  word.  And  there  was  Father 
3 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

N ;  many  a  time  I  laughed  and  chatted 

with  him,  but  he  never  said  the  word.  And 

there's  X,  and  Y,  and  Z Ah!"  the  old 

man  would  finish,  "and  now  that  I'm  back  in 
the  Church  of  God,  it  seems  to  me  I've  lost 
the  most  of  my  life!"  All  for  want  of  the 
word! 

No  man  of  us  all  can  plead  a  lack  of  such 
occasions.  Many  a  Catholic,  now-a-days,  is 
almost  solitary  in  a  circle  of  unbelieving 
associates.  Is  silence  friendly  then?  The 
man  who  drops  into  a  seat  beside  you  and 
wishes  you  a  cheery  good-morning,  may  be 
as  starved  and  stinted  of  all  knowledge  of 
things  divine  as  a  tribesman  of  the  Moros. 
More  than  possibly,  as  things  stand  now  in 
the  United  States,  he  has  never  said  a  childish 
prayer  by  his  mother's  knee;  never  learned 
to  reverence  the  Sacred  Name;  never  heard, 
at  home  or  at  school,  the  saving  truths  of 
Christ;  never  once  been  brought  face  to  face 
with  the  stupendous  truths  that  there  is  an 
Infinite  God,  and  that  man  has  an  immortal 
soul !  It  is  not  malice  with  him,  this  dense- 
ness  to  sacred  truth;  it  is  ignorance,  it  is 
preoccupation. 

This  is  a  distracted  age;  we  live  fast,  we 
notice  only  what  is  thrust  upon  us.  All  that 
4 


The  Apostleship  of  Speech 

he  has  heard  of  God's  Holy  Name  may  have 
been  (dreadful  thought)  when  it  was  used 
in  blasphemy,  or  as  the  nice  ornament  of 
some  well-turned  phrase;  or  at  the  best,  as 
a  vague  symbol  of  nature  or  human-kind, 
lacking  personality  and  dim  of  definition. 
Ask  the  missionary,  or.  him  who  has  care  of 
the  instruction  of  converts,  whether  this 
picture  be  too  darkly  drawn.  Religion  to 
this  man  may  be  only  the  queer  fancy  some 
men  have  to  while  away  a  Sunday  morning. 
That  God  is  a  person,  even  as  himself ;  that 
the  soul  has  ages  of  endless  life  before  it; 
that  the  world  is  only  a  trying-out  place  for 
the  brightest  or  darkest  hereafter;  that  there 
is  a  hell,  the  blaze  of  the  anger  of  God,  and 
a  Heaven,  the  smile  of  His  tenderness;  that 
every  man  and  woman  is  sacred,  is  of  God's 
own  kindred ;  that  what  seems  blind  chance 
is  only  a  bit,  ill-seen,  of  the  vast  schemes  of 
Infinite  Prevision — what  does  he  know,  what 
has  he  ever  dreamed  of  all  these  things? 

But  you  are  his  friend.  He  will  listen  to 
you,  if  you  are  ready  for  a  kindly  explana- 
tion. He  is  interested,  after  all,  in  most 
things  human,  in  your  affairs  particularly. 
What  a  revelation  to  his  ignorance,  and  what 
a  stimulus  from  his  dangerous  preoccupa- 
5 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

tion  with  merely  earthly  and  temporal  things, 
if  you  were  sometimes  to  take  occasion  from 
current  themes  to  explain  those  lovely  and 
satisfying  doctrines  of  the  Church,  which 
please  and  thrill  by  their  beauty  and  saneness 
even  where  faith  does  not  enter  in  and  beget 
acceptance  of  their  truth! 

If  it  were  golf  you  were  interested  in,  or 
stocks,  or  futures,  or  horses,  or  a  new  brand 
of  goods,  or  a  coming  marriage,  it  would  go 
hard,  but  he  would  have  to  listen  all  the  way 
down  town,  and  that  right  cheerfully.  Well, 
try  him  sometimes,  with  kindly  tact,  and 
opportunely,  on  some  Catholic  theme. 

I  say  opportunely,  but  fit  occasions  arc 
legion  now-a-days.  With  almost  every  ques- 
tion of  the  day  there  is  bound  up  some  point 
of  Catholic  principle  or  belief.  The  labor 
questions  of  the  times  call  up,  with  their 
multifarious  perplexities,  those  sanest  show- 
ings-forth  of  the  mind  of  Christendom,  the 
masterly  Encyclicals  of  Leo  XIII.  In  this 
connection  one  will  naturally  think  of  the 
vast  influence  for  good  of  the  Papacy  on  the 
world;  of  the  true  nature  of  that  spiritual 
leadership,  by  which  Christ  made  Peter  and 
his  successors  not  sinless  indeed  but  infallible, 
when  they  teach  us  in  His  name.  Thence 
6 


The  Apostleship  of  Speech 

opens  wide  the  whole  question  of  the 
Apostolic  Succession,  then  one  may  speak  of 
the  Roman  Curia,  and  all  the  admirable 
government  of  the  Church,  so  much  misrep- 
resented because  so  little  understood.  One 
may  fall  to  explaining,  also,  the  history  of 
the  Papacy;  why,  for  instance,  some  great 
ecclesiastics  may  have  been  great  rascals, 
without  their  unprincipled  lives  reflecting 
either  on  the  doctrine  or  discipline  of  the 
eternal  Church. 

Or  it  may  be  that  the  sad  state  of  unhappy 
France  comes  up  for  discussion,  and  one  is 
naturally  moved  to  explain  the  true  relation 
of  the  Church  and  State;  or  the  reasons  and 
policy  of  the  Church's  prohibition  of  Secret 
Societies — not  always  for  what  they  are,  but 
sometimes  also  for  what  they  may  come  to 
be;  or  the  Parochial  School  question,  and 
why  the  Church  so  stoutly  demands  Catholic 
teaching  for  Catholic  children. 

Again,  the  questions  which  turn  upon 
Marriage  and  Divorce  are  forever  bobbing 
up  in  our  speech  now-a-days.  The  uncom- 
promising stand  of  the  Church  on  such 
matters,  her  watchful  guarding  of  the 
sanctity  of  marriage,  and  her  reasons  for  it, 
how  natural  to  dwell  on  these! 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Or  Socialism — how  many  topics  does  it 
not  suggest?  The  reason  for  the  necessary 
and  unrelenting  hostility  of  the  Church, 
which  stands  for  piety  and  justice,  against  a 
creed  which  in  the  concrete  is  both  irreligious 
and  unjust;  and  so  on,  to  subjects  without 
number. 

"But  how  in  the  name  of  goodness,"  1 
seem  to  hear  some  one  cry  out  sadly,  "is  one 
to  be  ready  to  give  good  explanations  on  such 
subjects  as  these?" 

A  proper  question,  and  one  which  calls  for 
a  whole  treatise  by  itself.  But  one  can 
condense  after  the  manner  of  the  testy 
gentleman  who  cried  out  in  answer  to  a 
similar  inquiry:  "God  bless  you,  sir!  Why 
not  go  and  read  ?" 

Naturally,  to  be  a  proper  Catholic,  one 
must  glance  now  and  then  over  Catholic 
papers  and  have  some  acquaintance  with 
Catholic  magazines  and  books.  But  "why 
not,"  to  be  sure?  If  the  followers  of 
Christian  Science  and  its  airy  inconsistencies 
can  toil  to  be  letter-perfect  in  "Mother 
Eddy's"  clueless  mystifications,  so  as  to  have 
at  least  a  quotation  ready  for  every  need ; 
and  if  the  Spencerian  agnostic  can  bear  to 
trace  out  his  leader's  maunderings  to  the 
8 


Christ  Instructing  the  People 


The  Apostleship  of  Speech 

dusty  end,  surely  we  Catholics  can  all  endure 
to  become  prompt  and  ready  with  the  warm 
and  human,  yet  Divine  and  Heavenly,  truths 
and  principles  of  Christ. 

Wrong-headed  folk,  with  flimsy  theories, 
have  often  a  dreadful  gift  of  voluble  exposi- 
tion, which  puts  us  children  of  the  light  to 
shame.  In  season  and  out  of  season  they 
din  away  at  their  pet  theory,  until  by  mere 
repetition  they  wear  it  a  place  in  men's 
thoughts,  or  even  a  standing  in  their  esteem. 
We  must  not  imitate  their  fanatical  excesses 
— indeed  there  is  little  danger  as  things  go 
with  us  now;  but  the  temper  of  the  times  is 
such  that  even  the  truth  cannot  dispense 
with  some  of  this  emphasis  of  repetition  and 
ready  reply.  The  age  is  crowded  with 
clamoring  teachers ;  if  even  truth  is  silent  it 
will  be  unregarded  as  well.  On  the  other 
hand,  by  kindly  explanation,  timely  comment 
and  friendly  expostulation  and  reply,  one's 
beliefs  and  views  are  sure  to  gain  a  hearing, 
and  a  hearing  is  all  that  Catholic  Truth  need 
ask. 

In  fine,  look  on  this  picture,  and  on  this. 
Our  friend  Dick  has  a  fearfully  keen  nose 
for  controversy.  His  type,  I  own,  is  some- 
what rare  in  these  days.  Give  him  but  a 
9 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

little  opening  and  he  will  argue  away  for 
hours,  with  the  slightest  encouragement,  nay, 
in  spite  of  the  most  evident  distaste  and 
disgust  on  the  part  of  his  unwilling  victim. 
Dick  means  well,  to  be  sure  (his  selfishness 
is  half  unconscious)  ;  he  knows  a  great  deal, 
his  speech  is  fluent  and  sincere ;  he  only  lacks 
the  heavenly  gift  of  tact  and  opportuneness, 
but  lacking  this,  his  acrid  fluency  has  made 
many  a  helpless  fellow  sore  on  religion  and 
savage  against  pious  talk  for  all  after  days. 

Tom,  on  the  other  hand,  and  his  name  is 
many,  runs  quite  to  the  other  extreme.  He 
is  the  discreetest  fellow  in  the  world,  and 
sheers  off  from  questions  of  belief  and 
principles  like  a  timid  hare  at  the  hunter's 
halloo!  He  seldom  breathes  a  word  that 
can  benefit  anyone,  his  talk  is  all  remote 
from  religious  issues,  and  most  of  his  friends 
scarcely  know  whether  he  is  a  Catholic  or  a 
fellow  of  Huxley,  or  of  the  German  vision- 
aries. He  breaks  a  commandment.  His 
light  never  shines  at  all ! 

Harry,  on  the  other  hand — God  bless  him ! 
— holds  the  difficult  mean.  When  he  speaks 
of  religious  matters  he  does  it  in  as  easy, 
interested  a  way  as  when  he  talks  politics  or 
business.  His  mind  runs  naturally  on  the 
10 


The  Apostleship  of  Speech 

theme,  and  his  interest  carries  you  with  him. 
He  knows,  and  he  thinks  on  what  he  knows, 
and  remembers  it  readily  and  in  opportune 
connections.  There  is  neither  false  shame, 
nor  harsh  self-assertiveness  in  his  tone.  You 
see  earnest-faced  men  listening  to  his  quiet 
explanations  with  a  sort  of  steady  wonder; 
and  when  he  pauses  you  notice  that  they  sink 
back  and  murmur:  "By  Jove!  that  sounds 
sensible.  I  never  could  understand  just  what 
you  Catholics  thought  on  that  point  bef  jre." 
Ah,  if  there  were  only  more  Harrys  now 
amongst  us! 


11 


THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF  CONSISTENCY 

HERE  is  the  sincere  and  thoughtful 
Catholic  who  has  not  strongly 
wished  at  times  that  he  could  make  some 
converts  to  the  one  true  Faith?  All  of  us 
know  so  deeply,  from  our  every-day  experi- 
ence, the  sweetness  and  the  strength,  the 
beauty,  tenderness  and  power  of  our  holy 
religion,  and  the  cheer  and  guidance  which  it 
gives  us  on  our  way  towards  Heaven,  that  we 
should  be  dull  clods  indeed  not  to  desire  to 
share  these  amazing  and  neglected  treasures 
with  our  fellow-men. 

It  is  true,  of  course,  that  a  sincere  and  God- 
fearing non-Catholic  may  hope  to  save  his 
soul.  True,  also,  that  there  is  many  such  a 
one  who  puts  half-hearted  Catholics  utterly 
to  shame  by  the  earnestness,  uprightness  and 
goodness  of  his  life.  But  if  such  men  walk 
so  well  in  the  twilight,  how  gloriously,  we 
think,  they  would  run  onward  in  the  noonday 
splendor!  If  they  fight  so  valiantly,  nour- 
ished with  the  crumbs  that  have  fallen  from 
the  children's  table,  what  heroes  they  would 
become  if  they  were  fed  on  the  strong  Bread 
of  Angels,  and  given  to  drink  of  the  sweet 
12 


The  Apostleship  of  Consistency 

waters  of  God's  full  and  satisfying  Truth? 
The  fervor  and  earnestness  we  have  remarked 
in  so  many  converts  confirms  this  view  and 
urges  us  the  more  to  the  work  of  conversion. 
How  ardently  they  leap  forward  in  the  ways 
of  sanctity,  when  first  they  feel  the  mighty 
aid  of  the  Sacraments  and  of  Holy  Mass! 
How  eagerly  they  receive  the  rich  teachings 
of  Catholic  tradition  and  embrace  the 
thousand  helps  and  stays  which  God's 
Church  alone  can  give ! 

He  would  be  an  ungenerous  and  selfish 
man — or,  at  least,  a  very  thoughtless  one — 
who  had  never  wished  to  make  a  convert  to 
Catholic  truth.  But  when  it  comes  to  choos- 
ing out  the  means,  the  average  Catholic  man 
or  woman  may  well  be  perplexed  to  know 
just  how  the  good  work  is  to  be  begun. 

"Arguing  is  no  use,"  they  say;  "it  only 
makes  people  stubborn  and  angry.  To  ex- 
plain the  truths  of  Faith  is  all  very  well,  but 
how  am  I  to  get  people  to  listen  and  how 
am  I  to  answer  the  awkward  questions  they 
will  be  sure  to  ask?  I  cannot  write  books 
nor  give  lectures,  nor  preach  sermons;  it 
isn't  my  business,  and,  besides,  I  haven't  the 
talent  nor  the  time.  So  what  in  the  world 
am  I  to  do?" 

13 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

This  may  be  all  very  natural  and  true,  and 
if  these  were  indeed  the  only  ways  of  making 
converts  to  the  Faith,  many  Catholics  might 
be  pardoned  for  shrinking  from  the  task. 
Happily,  these  are  not  the  only  ways.  There 
is  an  argument  stronger  with  most  men  than 
any  logic — a  way  of  preaching  open  to  every 
one,  and  to  which  no  living  soul  can  choose 
but  listen,  the  argument  of  steadfast  good 
example,  of  a  consistent  living-up  to  our 
Catholic  principles  and  our  Catholic  beliefs. 

We  walk  about  in  this  world  very 
obscurely,  it  may  be.  We  do  not  seem 
prominent  persons  in  the  scheme  of  things  ; 
nor  apt  to  draw  men's  eyes  to  look  at  us. 
Yet  every  day  of  our  lives,  almost  at  every 
hour  of  our  days,  at  home  and  in  the  street, 
in  the  busy  hours  or  when  we  are  taking  our 
ease  and  our  pleasure,  careless  and  free  and 
unconscious  of  the  world's  remark,  we  are 
being  watched,  studied,  thought  ef,  imitated 
it  may  be,  by  the  restless,  eager  spirits  of  our 
fellow-men.  What  is  a  man  so  interested  in 
as  in  his  neighbor?  What  does  he  talk  of 
more  often;  what  does  he  speculate  upon  so 
eagerly;  by  what  is  he  so  deeply  moved,  as 
by  the  sayings  and  doings,  the  character  and 
principles  of  other  men? 
14 


The  Apostleship  of  Consistency 

Blind  and  deluded  though  men  often  are 
as  to  their  own  proper  vices  and  virtues,  they 
have  a  wonderful  shrewdness  in  searching 
out  and  summing  up  the  genuine  character 
of  another.  It  is  no  use,  in  the  matter  of 
religious  principle  especially,  to  try  and  play 
the  saint  and  be  the  sinner.  Nothing  but 
sincere  and  practical  fidelity,  the  pure  gold 
of  honesty,  seven  times  tried,  will  wear  well 
and  shine  well  for  long  against  the  rough 
usage  and  trying  ways  of  this  hurly-burly 
world ! 

These  are  truisms,  as  we  all  know;  but 
apply  them  to  yourself,  to  the  individual 
Catholic,  moving  about  in  the  highways  of 
life  and  dealing  with  your  fellows.  Though 
they  know  that  you  are  "a  Catholic,"  many 
of  them  realize  only  vaguely  what  the  name 
implies.  But  if  they  recognize  in  you  a  man 
apart  from  and  distinguished  above  his 
fellow-men  by  reason  of  his  honesty,  industry, 
kindness  to  his  neighbors,  by  his  truth,  honor 
and  good  faith,  they  will  grow  a  bit  curious 
to  learn  more  of  what  Catholics  think,  and 
strive  for,  and  believe.  Your  courage,  your 
consistency  and  modest  faithfulness  to  your 
principles  will  make  you  stand  out  in  noble 
relief,  against  the  general  carelessness  and 
15 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

self-indulgence  of  the  times.  They  will  con- 
ceive~a  huge  respect  for  the  Faith  which  can 
so  lift  a  man  above  the  common  lust  and 
avarice  of  the  world;  they  will  inquire  into 
the  Church's  teachings,  open  their  hearts  to 
her  appeal,  and  God's  grace  will  have  an 
entrance  to  win  them  over  to  the  truth. 

And  you,  sincere,  simple  and  consistent  to 
your  Catholic  principles,  without  any  noise 
of  argument,  or  any  array  of  lectures  or  of 
books,  you  will  truly  have  converted  them, 
you  will  have  convinced  and  persuaded  them 
by  the  most  convincing,  most  persuasive  of 
all  arguments,  by  the  solid  and  practical  proof 
of  a  life  consistent  with  your  holy  faith. 

There  is  another  body  of  non-Catholics 
who  do  know  very  well  what  a  Catholic  is 
supposed  to  profess  and  practise  and  believe. 
They  are  in  need,  not  of  information,  but  of 
conviction.  They  see  the  beauty  of  the  Faith, 
but  are  not  yet  quite  sure  of  its  truth,  and 
so  they  waver  in  that  dim  borderland  which 
lies  between  "I  doubt"  and  "1  believe."  Your 
actions,  far,  far  more  than  your  words,  have 
a  keen,  almost  an  agonizing  interest  for  such 
men  as  these.  From  the  actions  of  Catholics 
they  seek  to  judge,  alas!  of  the  truth  or  false- 
hood of  the  Catholic  Faith.  They  do  not 
16 


The  Apostleship  of  Consistency 

stop  to  argue  that  a  man  may  be  convinced, 
but  inconsistent,  professing  high  ideals,  and 
practising  unworthy  ones.  They  merely  say 
to  themselves : 

"There  is  So-and-so.  He  is  a  Catholic. 
See  how  he  acts !  In  business  he  is  no  better 
than  the  rest  of  us.  In  his  family  circle  he 
is  no  angel;  in  his  recreations  he  is  no  saint. 
Yet  he  is  a  Catholic.  These  Catholics  do  not 
practise  what  they  preach.  No  Catholicity 
for  me!" 

Who  has  balked  his  conversion,  and  helped 
the  powers  of  darkness  to  keep  him  from  the 
light?  Sad  to  say,  one  of  the  hardest  to 
answer  of  all  arguments  against  the  Faith,  is 
the  evil  behavior  of  men  who  profess  to 
believe. 

Or,  again,  more  happily,  we  may  hear  some 
non-Catholic  remark :  "There  is  So-and-so — 
a  clean,  upright,  noble  fellow  if  there  ever 
was  one.  He  seems  to  have  some  secret 
which  the  rest  of  us  lack.  He  uses  the  world 
as  if  he  used  it  not.  Industrious,  brisk,  busi- 
nesslike, capable — yes!  But  he  seems  all  the 
while  to  have  his  heart  set  on  something 
above  and  beyond.  He  believes  in  a  here- 
after, and  lives  for  it.  His  family  is  holy. 
His  home  is  a  sanctuary — bright,  clean, 
17 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

cheery,  loving — with  an  atmosphere  of  peace 
and  joy  which  are  not  quite  of  this  world. 
He  is  a  knight — that's  what  he  is — a  Bayard, 
without  base  fear  and  without  reproach.  I'd 
like  to  know  his  secret,  and  I  believe  it  is  his 
Faith !  If  it  is,  then  the  Catholic  religion  is 
the  religion  for  me !"  Who  has  been  the  chief 
instrument  under  God  to  bring  this  waver- 
ing soul  into  the  light  of  His  Father's  house? 

Not  many  weeks  ago,  at  Sunday  Mass  in 
one  of  our  great  cities,  a  poor  serving-maid 
was  going  to  Communion.  Her  faith  was 
pure  and  deep,  and  the  reverence  and  love 
of  her  soul  were  strikingly  expressed  in  every 
look  and  gesture.  How  little  she  dreamed 
of  preaching  or  giving  edification !  But  one 
who  was  not  a  Catholic,  who  was  hesitating 
at  the  very  threshold  of  the  Faith,  had  come 
to  the  church  that  morning,  and  was  quietly 
watching  the  faithful  as  they  walked  up  to 
the  Holy  Table. 

"How  wonderful  the  fervor  and  recollec- 
tion of  that  poor  girl  was!"  said  she  after- 
ward. "One  can  see  how  truly  she  believes 
that  Christ  is  present  in  the  Sacrament." 

So  it  is  with  us  all.     Will  we,  nill  we,  our 
daily  actions  blaze  out  a  message  and  token 
to  the  watchful  eyes  of  men. 
18 


The  Apostleship  of  Consistency 

"If  we  but  knew  when  we  were  under 
observation  we  would  be  doubly  careful  and 
consistent  then!"  Well,  we  are  under  obser- 
vation always  and  everywhere,  in  the  eyes  of 
a  critical  and  watchful  age.  In  the  old  days 
the  Church  had  need  of  martyrs,  which  means 
"witnesses"  to  give  bloody  evidence  of  her 
truth  to  a  cold  and  unbelieving  world.  She 
has  need  of  martyrs  still,  not  bloody  martyrs 
now,  but  martyrs  to  duty,  to  sincerity,  to 
faith,  to  the  consistent  practice  of  the  Chris- 
tian creed.  Who  will  credit  that  we  believe 
in  the  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Eucharist,  believe 
that  this  life-giving  Bread  is  Christ  Himself, 
fearfully  humiliated  for  our  love,  if  we  avoid 
the  Tabernacle  where  He  dwells  until  we  are 
driven  thither  on  Sunday  morning  by  the 
threat  of  mortal  sin?  Who  will  credit  us 
with  a  faith  in  the  last  great  judgment  if  we 
do  not  act  as  though  we  looked  forward  to 
being  one  day  brought  to  judgment? 

Ah,  if  we  took  all  this  to  heart,  and  acted 
out  in  every  word  and  deed  the  faith  that  is 
in  us,  what  noble  and  effective  apostles  we 
should  be  to  bring  our  friends  and  fellows 
into  the  fold  of  Christ !  Writing  is  an  excel- 
lent means  to  make  conversions;  kind  and 
tactful  conversation  is  a  powerful  aid ;  so  is 
19 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

prayer ;  so  is  timely  comment  and  explanation. 
But  how  the  good  work  done  towards  con- 
verting the  world  would  double  and  treble — 
and  go  on  doubling  and  trebling  by  leaps  and 
bounds — if  only  the  great  body  of  Catholic 
men  and  women  would  bestir  themselves  to 
spread  the  truth  abroad,  and  shine  it,  so  to 
speak,  in  their  neighbors'  eyes — by  the  strong, 
direct,  appealing,  irresistible  means  of  living 
up  steadfastly  to  the  Faith  which  is  in  them 
— by  the  exercise  of  the  great  Apostleship 
of  Consistency! 


20 


"NOT  RIGGED  TO  DO  IT" 

I  ONCE  knew  an  amiable  old  gentleman, 
— not  so  very  old  either,  but  in  that 
mellow  way  of  life  where  one's  little  ways 
are  set  forevermore, — who  had  a  gift  for 
many  useful  things.  He  could  make  you 
anything  you  liked  in  wood,  and  make  it 
beautifully,  with  a  trim,  old-fashioned  com- 
pleteness few  modern  carvers  or  joiners  can 
attain.  He  could  make  relishes, — old-world 
relishes, — full  of  piquant  savors  that  made 
simple  fare  a  feast  for  kings.  He  could 
mend  precious  broken  things,  old  china,  err 
trinkets,  that  you  mourned  over,  so  that  their 
last  state  was  prettier  than  the  first.  Tn  a 
word,  there  was  no  end  to  the  neat  and  useful 
things  this  much-accomplished  man  could  do. 
"What  a  convenient  person  to  have  about 
one,"  you  will  straightway  think  to  yourself. 
So,  to  be  sure,  he  was.  Yet  the  full  comfort 
and  usefulness  of  his  varied  talents  was 
hindered  a  bit  by  just  a  single  oddity  he  had. 
Whenever  you  approached  him,  as  people 
often  did,  to  ask  the  exercise  of  some  one 
of  his  varied  talents,  he  would  give  you  a 
rueful  glance,  and  screwing  up  his  forehead 
21 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

in  regret,  would  answer  mournfully:  "I'd 
gladly  fix  it  for  you,  so  gladly,  but,  do  you 
know,  I  am  not  rigged  to  do  it."  That  was 
the  haunting  shadow  that  stalked  his  path. 
He  was  never  rigged ! 

Let  us  hasten  to  add  it  was  not  laziness  in 
him,  not  in  the  least.  Nor  was  it  a  cheap 
excuse,  nor  any  unwillingness  to  oblige  and 
serve  you  that  made  him  say  it.  He  was  the 
most  serviceable  of  men,  and  as  full  of  kind- 
ness as  summer  is  of  sunshine.  It  was  a  real 
and  obstinate  difficulty  he  always  saw,  crouch- 
ing like  a  lion  in  his  way.  He  was  not  rigged 
to  do  it!  Perhaps  it  was  a  tool  which  he 
must  absolutely  have  to  polish  off  his  work, 
and  which,  he  knew  for  certain,  was  nowhere 
in  the  county.  Perhaps  it  was  some  delicate 
ingredient,  if  you  spoke  of  relishes,  without 
which  his  best  recipe  was  a  mere  mess  and 
silly  failure,  and  which  didn't  grow,  he  was 
sure,  anywhere  this  side  of  salt  water.  Per- 
haps— oh,  there  were  any  number  of  per- 
hapses,  but  the  gist  of  them  all  was  this:  he 
simply  wasn't  rigged  to  do  it ! 

Of  course,  with  his  kind  heart,  it  was  not 

so   hard   to   get   him   over   this   mountainous 

objection.     And   when  he  had   once   set  his 

mind  to  do  the  thing  you  asked,  rigged  or 

22 


"Not  Rigged  To  Do  It" 

not  rigged,  his  ingenuity  was  a  match  for 
anything.  He  could  use  tools  out  of  all 
measure  of  their  common  purpose,  and  make 
a  penknife  do  for  any  tool.  He  could  torture 
allspice  and  onions  till  they  breathed  of 
tarragon,  and  make  a  homely  kitchen  garden 
yield  all  the  savors  of  Gascony  and  Spain. 
But  despite  these  various  resources  of  his 
native  genius,  that  thought  forever  haunted 
him  like  an  obsession  and  held  his  hand  from 
any  trial  of  skill ;  that  sad  refrain  was  ever 
in  his  ears,  "I  am  not  rigged  to  do  it!" 

How  I  should  like,  if  morals  were  not  so 
tedious,  to  cut  a  sheaf  of  serviceable  com- 
parisons from  the  amiable  eccentricity  of  that 
good  man  I  knew !  You  and  I,  my  dear  and 
patient  reader,  have  given  the  same  excuse, 
many  a  time,  to  save  the  doing  of  some  golden 
deed.  Do  you  remember,  when  the  good 
thought  came  to  you — of  what? — some  deed 
of  mercy  and  kindness,  not  easy,  perhaps,  to 
do,  but  rich  in  promise  of  results.  It  came 
like  an  inspiration.  Who  knows?  Perhaps 
it  was  truly  a  message  from  the  Father  of 
lights,  bidding  you  help  your  brother.  You 
were  moved  to  do  it  generously,  you  planned 
the  ways  and  means.  Then  came  chill  Calcu- 
lation, with  its  selfish  breath  and  blew  cold 
23 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

on  your  generous  fervor.  You  said,  in  effect 
at  least:  "I  am  not  rigged  to  do  it.  If  I  had 
more  time,  if  I  had  more  talents,  if  I  were  in 
a  position  to  do  the  thing  as  it  should  be 
done,  if  I  were  the  proper  person,  if  circum- 
stances were  other  than  they  are,  if  this,  if 
that — ah,  then,  then  I  would  do  it  gladly, 
nobly,  effectively.  But  now,  alas,  I  am  not 
rigged !"  So  the  inspiration  faded,  the  little 
voice  within  you  faltered  and  was  still,  the 
opportunity  escaped  you.  That  credit  stands 
forever  blank  for  you  on  the  great  ledgers 
of  the.  Chancery  of  Heaven. 

Or  again,  it  was  some  work  of  zeal  that 
called  upon  us.  Perhaps  we  were  asked  to 
bear  our  share  in  aiding  some  noble  charity. 
Perhaps  it  was  our  personal  effort  that  was 
wanted  to  help  a  good  cause  on.  How  many 
chances  for  unselfish  effort  have  come  to  our 
doors  and  knocked,  perhaps  tapped  only 
timidly,  perhaps  rapped  long  and  loud !  And 
we,  opening  a  little  chink  lest  they  should 
rush  in  upon  us  unawares  and  spoil  our  calm 
seclusion,  we  have  answered  through  the 
cranny:  "Pray  excuse  me;  I  am  not  rigged. 
To  tell  the  truth,  I  cannot  see  my  way  to  aid 
you.  Another  time,  maybe,  when  this  and 
that  and  the  other  are  off  my  hands.  But 
24 


"Not  Rigged  To  Do  It" 

now,  I  really  haven't  got  the  time,  the  money. 
I  am  not  rigged  to  do  it!  I  pray  you,  go 
away;  importunate  or  timid  pleader,  hold  me 
excused." 

And  the  good  deed  went  on  to  a  neigh- 
bor's door,  far,  far  less  rigged,  perhaps,  than 
we,  and  it  was  welcomed  and  entered  in  and 
blessed  the  dwelling.  But  our  opportunity  is 
passed  away. 

Did  you  smile,  dear  reader,  when  you 
thought  of  the  queer  persuasion  of  yonder 
old  friend  of  mine,  that  he  was  never 
"rigged"  to  exercise  his  various  crafts  and 
talents?  So  do  the  angels  smile  at  us,  for 
so  often  thinking  that  we  are  not  "rigged"  to 
do  the  good  that  comes  to  seek  us.  His 
ingenuity  and  deftness  were  far  more  than  a 
match  for  any  ordinary  awkwardness  of  tools 
or  stuff;  he  was  always  "rigged"  by  his  own 
natural  genius  to  do  whatever  he  had  a  mind 
to.  So  could  we  accomplish  many  a  worthy 
deed  we  balk  at  now,  if  only  we  were  content 
to  use  the  homely  means  that  lie  about  us 
and  within  us. 

Now,  gentle  reader,  descend  from  general- 
ities and  look  about  you  a  bit,  and  see  how 
many  good  works  lie  ready  to  your  hand. 
Will  you  say :  "I  am  not  rigged  to  do  them"  ? 
25 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

There  are  your  own  home-folk,  the  people  of 
your  intimate  acquaintance.  Have  you  not 
had  many  a  thought  of  them?  of  good  words 
that  you  might  speak  to  them,  to  cheer  them 
and  guide  them  along  better  ways?  of  kind 
encouragement  and  sympathy  that  you  could 
offer,  to  help  them  through  dangerous  passes 
or  hearten  them  along  noble  paths?  Could 
you  not,  many  a  time,  instruct  or  admonish 
or  console  them,  as  each  one  needs?  If  you 
say,  "I  am  not  prepared,"  what  does  that 
mean,  to  be  sure?  Merely  that  you  are  not 
perfect,  that  you  might  be  better  fit.  Who  of 
mortals  could  not  say  the  same  with  regard 
to  any  worthy  undertaking  whatever?  Any 
man  or  woman  among  us,  with  prudence  and 
right  feeling,  can  give  some  worthy  aid  to 
his  own  people,  in  his  own  circle  of  friends. 
Then  there  is  the  wider  sphere  of  your 
acquaintances.  We  can  give  only  the  vaguest 
outlines  here,  which  everyone  must  sketch  in 
for  himself.  Have  we  not  all  of  us  some 
friends  who  need  a  word  of  kindly  instruc- 
tion in  matters  of  religious  practice  and 
belief?  Could  we  not  say  the  word,  and  aid 
them  on  towards  Heaven?  Ah,  "I  am  not 
ready,"  "I  don't  know  enough  myself,"  "I 
hesitate  to  intrude,  with  my  very  scanty 
26 


"Not  Rigged  To  Do  It" 

qualifications";  in  a  word,  "I  am  not  rigged 
to  do  it,"  and  so  God's  work  must  go  undone. 

See  how  one  could  widen  the  application 
of  this  little  instance  until  it  helped  us  to 
account  for  half  the  ignorance,  the  folly  and 
the  sin  that  blights  the  earth.  The  ignorant 
are  ignorant  still;  the  foolish  and  the  sinful 
are  unadmonished,  because  the  men  and 
women  who  might  tactfully  and  lovingly 
step  in  and  remedy  the  evil  "are  not  pre- 
pared, do  not  feel  equal  to  the  task,  are  not 
quite  fit  just  now" — "they  are  not  rigged  to 
do  it!" 

Does  God  mean  us  to  act  so,  do  you  think? 
Will  He  take  this  monotonous  excuse  of  ours 
for  leaving  His  work  so  sadly  undone,  and 
for  failing  so  mournfully  to  help  our  sisters 
and  our  brothers  towards  His  knowledge  and 
His  service  and  His  love?  For — and  here  is 
a  very  serious  thought  indeed — we  sometimes 
seem  to  throw  the  blame  on  God  with  this 
sorry  excuse  of  ours.  He  gives  to  us  these 
duties,  these  opportunities,  these  suggestions 
of  His  grace, — to  us  and  to  no  others,  no 
angel  and  no  Saint.  He  gives  them  to  us 
as  we  are,  not  as  we  might,  or  could,  or 
would,  or  should  have  been.  It  is  to  us  with 
our  imperfections,  our  shortcomings,  our 
27 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

insufficiencies,  our  ignorances  and  our  little 
worth,  that  He  has  given  in  charge  the  wel- 
fare of  our  brother's  soul,  perhaps  even  his 
soul's  salvation.  For  the  one  word  that  he 
will  take  may  be  one  that  only  we  could  give 
him.  He  may  be  waiting  for  our  word  of 
counsel,  teaching,  admonition.  We,  and  we 
only,  may  have  the  key  to  fit  the  rusty  wards 
of  his  poor  heart.  How  melancholy  if  we 
should  hold  back  and  fail  to  say  the  word, 
because,  forsooth,  "we  are  not  rigged." 

One  may  say  as  much  about  the  many 
other  avenues  of  effort  in  behalf  of  God,  of 
the  Church,  of  Catholic  charities,  which 
stretch  away  before  each  Catholic's  feet.  If 
you  have  leisure,  there  are  the  many  works 
of  social  charity — helping  the  poor,  housing 
the  homeless  child,  teaching  the  ignorant, 
visiting  the  prisoner,  nursing  the  sick,  com- 
forting the  sorrowful  and  the  unhappy— all, 
in  a  word,  of  the  various  and  the  precious 
works  which  we  call  "corporal  works  of 
mercy."  Then  there  are  the  spiritual  works 
of  mercy,  too,  which  each  one  of  us  learned 
by  rote  from  his  catechism.  Surely  all  of  us 
are  fit  and  equal  and  able  for  some  of  these. 

Let  us  go  back  again  to  our  kindly  old 
friend  of  the  beginning  and  from  his  memory 
28 


"Not  Rigged  To  Do  It" 

draw  a  happy  omen.  He,  you  will  remember, 
though  he  was  always  haunted  by  that  dark 
apprehension  of  "not  being  rigged  to  do  it," 
got  over  it  bravely  at  a  few  words  of  affec- 
tionate persuasion,  and  turned  his  skilful 
hand  right  manfully  to  the  work  he  was 
besought  to  do.  Are  not  you  and  I,  dear 
reader,  equally  good-natured,  and  will  we  not, 
in  our  weightier  tasks  of  Christian  love  and 
charity,  copy  his  hearty  compliance,  no  less 
thai}  we  have  copied  his  quaint  excuse? 
When  hereafter  a  wise  and  prudent  and 
fruitful  thought  of  doing  some  good  work 
for  God  or  our  neighbor  pops  into  our  head, 
we  shall  say  to  ourselves  rig'.it  manfully,  not 
hearing  our  lower  self's  denial :  "Now  do 
be  good,  and  set  to  work  at  it,  and  don't  be 
offering  that  tiresome  old  excuse  again : 
'Really,  you  know,  I'd  like  to,  but — I'm  not 
just  rigged  to  do  it!'  " 


29 


OUR  TALK  AT  HOME 

IO  love  and  do  good  to  one  another,  that 
is,  after  all,  a  very  great  part  of  what 
we  are  to  accomplish  here  in  this  world.  And 
to  do  us  justice,  we  are  usually  willing  enough 
to  help  and  benefit  our  neighbor,  if  only  we 
see  a  practicable  and  present  way.  Half  of 
those  wrho  do  next  to  nothing  for  other  folk, 
act  so  because  they  think  of  nothing  to  do. 
But  tell  us  what  is  to  be  done  and  how  to 
go  about  it,  and  you  shall  see  some  hearty 
workers  indeed. 

Now  there  is  a  great  deal  of  very  useful 
talk  now-a-days  about  various  apostleships, 
and  the  word  "Apostleship"  in  this 
connection,  usually  means  nothing  else 
than  a  way  of  doing  to  our  neighbor 
some  spiritual  good.  Some  of  these 
are  for  the  rich,  like  the  Apostleship  of 
Endowment ;  some  for  the  learned  or  the 
talented,  like  the  Apostleship  of  the  Written 
Word;  others  (and  those  the  most  interest- 
ing), are  for  any  one  and  every  one  among 
us,  like  the  Apostleship  of  Prayer,  or  the 
Apostleship  of  Speech. 

We  have  said  something  already,  very 
30 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

briefly,  about  the  second  of  these  apostle- 
ships,  that  of  frank,  kindly  and  familiar 
speech  upon  Catholic  subjects  and  Catholic 
views  and  beliefs,  with  those  who  come 
within  our  everyday  circle  of  influence  and 
appeal.  We  are  all  of  us  constantly  talking 
to  one  another,  discussing,  inquiring,  reply- 
ing, exchanging  opinions  and  ideas.  And  so, 
we  said,  any  one  of  us  needs  only  to  throw 
into  his  daily  talk  some  genial,  honest, 
interesting  words  of  Catholic  truth,  to  become 
at  once  a  real  apostle,  that  is  to  say,  a 
messenger,  a  herald  of  Catholic  Ethics  and 
Faith. 

Now  let  us  descend  a  little  into  some  of 
the  special  forms  which  this  Apostleship  -of 
Speech  may  assume  and  some  of  the  special 
opportunities  it  may  offer  us,  and  it  would 
be  well  to  begin,  where  charity  does  in  the 
proverb,  right  at  home.  Fathers  and  mothers, 
big  brothers  and  big  sisters,  I  wonder  how 
many  of  us  realize  the  power  we  are  con- 
stantly using  for  good  or  ill,  the  influence  of 
our  daily  speech  at  home. 

We  boast   sometimes   that   "home"   is   one 

of   the   most   tender   and   meaning   words   in 

our  English  tongue.     We  declare  that  many 

other  languages   have  no   real   equivalent   to 

31 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

convey  all  the  wealth  and  warmth  of  loving 
thought  and  memory,  of  kindly,  generous 
feeling  which  stirs  in  us  at  this  holy  syllable 
"home."  To  have  a  happy  home  is,  we 
rightly  think,  an  unspeakable  blessing.  To 
lack  a  home,  for  man  or  woman  or  child,  is 
a  capital  and  dire  misfortune.  "A  man's 
home,"  according  to  the  old  English  saying 
which  we  have  made  our  own,  "is  his  castle," 
his  secure  retreat,  a  kingdom  of  comfort  and 
of  cheer,  a  little  stronghold  of  affection  and 
interest  and  kindly  sympathy  against  the  rude 
buffets  of  this  selfish  and  unfeeling  world. 

We  know,  too,  when  we  reflect  on  the 
matter,  that  home  is  a  little  commonwealth, 
where  each  one  has  his  part  to  play  for  the 
well-being  of  the  whole.  Mother  and  father 
have,  to  be  sure,  a  paramount  influence;  but 
every  one  down  to  the  youngest  child  has  his 
share  in  making  or  unmaking  the  peacefulness 
and  holiness  of  home. 

In  what  way  is  this  influence  most  often 
and  most  effectively  exerted?  To  be  sure, 
by  our  daily  and  common  speech!  What  is 
hastily  said  at  breakfast,  or  slips  from  us  as 
we  pass  about  the  house,  or  is  discussed  at 
the  family  dinner,  or  chatted  about  around 
the  evening  lamp,  or  mooted  in  the  parlor, — 
32 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

this  most  perhaps  of  all,  makes  or  mars  the 
peace  and  happiness  and  holiness  of  our  home. 
For  in  these  chance  remarks,  these  off-hand 
conversations  and  familiar,  cosy  talks,  we 
throw  off  countless  little  hints  and  corusca- 
tions, so  to  speak,  of  our  most  inward  and 
intimate  selves.  We  reveal  our  sudden 
thoughts  and  impulses,  we  show  our  desires, 
our  principles,  our  aims,  all,  whether  it  be 
good  or  ill,  that  we  have  been  cherishing  and 
fostering  and  brooding  over  for  years  and 
years.  These  things  leap  out,  sometimes  in 
a  tiny  sentence,  sometimes  in  a  single  word 
like  little  sparks  of  goodness  or  of  wicked- 
ness, and  kindle  fires  of  good  or  evil  in  our 
hearer's  inmost  heart.  The  doors  and  win- 
dows of  their  hearts  are  all  thrown  open  in 
the  summer  air  of  trustfulness  and  love,  and 
our  flying  words  blow  in  easily  for  weal  or 
woe.  And  this  goes  on,  not  for  an  hour  or 
a  day,  but  for  all  the  long  months  and  years 
of  the  familiar  intercourse  of  home.  No 
wonder  then  that  we  influence  one  another 
by  our  daily  speech  of  words  and  actions ; 
for  actions,  too,  are  a  sort  of  speech  and 
often  carry  our  meaning  very  much  better 
and  more  easily  than  words. 

Parents    sometimes    feel    deeply    distressed 
33 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

when  they  see,  growing  in  their  tender  chil- 
dren, the  lineaments  of  their  own  short- 
comings and  sins.  They  will  put  on  a  very 
serious  expression  and  take  Mary  or  Tom 
aside  to  warn  him  earnestly  against  letting 
that  evil  habit  gain  upon  him.  Do  they  hope 
that  one  official  warning  so  ceremoniously 
given  will  stand  for  a  moment  against  the 
long,  quiet  talk  and  action  of  so  many  years? 
"Don't,  for  Heaven's  sake,"  they  will  say, 
"get  into  that  ugly  way  of  criticizing  people !" 
But  has  not  the  lad  heard  you  for  years 
dwelling  on  the  faults  of  your  friends?  Can 
one  brief  gust  of  studied  sermonizing  avail 
to  sweep  away  that  heavy  and  brooding  cloud 
of  innumerable  and  daily  acts  and  words? 

It  is  worth  while,  then,  very,  very  much 
worth  while,  to  give  some  care  and  thought 
to  how  we  may  carry  on  this  Apostleship  of 
the  Home.  And  this  should  weigh  on  us  all 
the  more  because  of  the  circumstance  that 
we  must  all  be  either  apostles  or  perverters 
there.  Abroad,  one  can  fight  shy  of  com- 
pany and  keep  pretty  much  to  himself,  not 
doing  any  one  so  very  much  good  or  harm. 
But  it  is  not  so  at  home.  Here  we  must  all 
be  constantly  taking  sides  and  influencing 
our  little  sphere  for  good  or  ill.  Talk  we 
34 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

must,  act  we  must  in  the  presence  of  every 
one,  and  not  to  talk  and  act  properly  and 
holily  and  well,  is  to  be  talking  and  acting 
badly,  doing  our  share  to  mar  the  sanctities 
of  our  home. 

Of  course,  no  one  will  here  understand  me 
to  mean  to  commend  anything  like  a  sancti- 
monious way  of  acting,  or  a  forcedly  religious 
style  of  talk.  The  only  good  purpose  that 
these  would  serve  at  home  would  be  to  start 
some  merry  laughter  that  w7ould  bring  us  to 
our  senses  again.  But  I  do  most  heartily 
mean  that  we  should  particularly  and  ear- 
nestly try  always  to  speak  and  to  act  worthily 
and  holily  among  our  own  people,  by  our 
own  fireside. 

First  of  all,  there  are  the  things  we  should 
not  speak  of  at  all.  Here  one  might  mention 
a  very  host  of  harmful  and  ugly  subjects 
which  too  often,  alas,  creep  into  our  talk  to 
poison  the  quiet  air  of  home.  The  bitter, 
and  open  word  of  slander  and  rash  judgment, 
we  need  not  pause  to  censure,  but  there  is  a 
subtler  way  of  hurting  our  neighbor  by  little 
sneers,  discreditable  anecdotes,  left-handed 
compliments,  which  begin :  "So-and-so  is  a 
good  fellow ;  I  always  liked  the  chap,  but — " 
and  here  follows  an  unkindly  stab.  There  is 
35 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

a  way  of  speaking  of  one's  Pastor,  one's 
Bishop,  and  what  not,  which  some  good  folk 
fall  into  from  very  thoughtlessness,  but  which 
sadly  hurts  the  holiness  of  home.  You  know 
quite  well  that  Father  X  is  a  good,  fervent 
man.  But  he  has  his  faults  (as  who  has 
not?),  and  you  make  free  to  point  them  out 
quite  emphatically,  over  the  roast.  "Who  is 
the  worse,  pray,  for  that?  The  grown-ups 
will  understand,  and  the  children  don't  take 
any  harm!"  Are  you  so  sure  that  they  will 
understand?  Has  not  a  light  word  of  dis- 
paragement, carelessly  spoken,  sometimes 
tarnished  your  respect  and  esteem  for  a 
friend?  Again,  there  is  little  Tom  or  Jerry, 
who  listens  with  wide  eyes  to  everything  papa 
or  mamma  or  big  brother  is  saying.  Can  he 
make  excuses  or  allowances?  No,  but  he  can 
comprehend  quite  well  that  after  all  there  is 
something  wrong  with  Father  X,  to  whom 
the  good  Sisters  always  tell  him  to  be  so 
respectful.  Do  you  remember  when  you 
were  young  yourself,  and  made  your  first 
discoveries  as  to  the  faults  of  your  youthful 
heroes?  How  long  the  memory  of  such 
disillusionments  remains ! 

It  is  a  pitiful  thing  to  see  the  atmosphere 
of  the  world  creep  in  and  taint  the  holiness 
36 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

of  home.  To  be  forever  praising  men  whose 
only  claim  to  praise  is  that  they  have  suc- 
ceeded in  getting  name  and  fame,  or  lands 
and  gold,  is  pitiful  in  us  travellers  towards 
the  Eternal  Sunrise;  but  it  is  a  crime  to  let 
the  little  ones  hear  us  singing  our  psalms  to 
Mammon  day  after  day,  day  after  day,  as 
though  worldly  fortune  were  the  last  end  of 
man.  Will  not  they,  too,  become  little  idol- 
aters, and  give  incense  to  the  god  of  gold? 
Do  we  not  sometimes  forget  that  what  we 
most  praise  will  be  what  our  sons  and 
daughters  will  very  likely  most  desire  in  the 
days  to  be? 

We  have  dwelt  upon  our  duties  to  the 
children  especially,  in  this  matter  of  our  daily 
speech  at  home,  because  they  are  most 
impressionable  and  confiding,  and  will  catch 
most  readily  the  trend  and  color  of  their 
elders'  thought.  They  listen  most  when  we 
least  suspect  it,  and  are  more  interested  some- 
times in  what  we  say  to  each  other  than  in 
what  is  directly  spoken  to  themselves.  But 
we  have  a  duty  to  the  grown-ups  no  less. 
Who  can  dwell  in  an  atmosphere  of  pure  and 
worthy  speech  and  not  be  the  better  for  it? 
Who  can  hear  unworthy  words  for  long  and 
not  run  a  risk  of  being  himself  defiled? 
37 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

A  meaner  sort  of  conversation  still  is  the 
foolish  cackling  of  the  snob.  Society  and 
exclusiveness,  and  the  delicate  and  senseless 
distinctions  between  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Tweedle- 
dum and  the  Tweedledees  are  no  fit  subjects 
for  the  family  circle,  where  should  breathe 
honesty,  simplicity  and  peace.  To  worship 
gold  and  lands  is  bad  enough  in  all  con- 
science, but  it  is  hardly  so  base  as  to  worship 
social  distinctions,  airy  nothings,  too  often 
founded  on  no  solid  reasons  whatever. 

"But  what  is  one  to  talk  of?"  An  easy 
answer  would  be  to  borrow  the  words  of  St. 
Paul  which  he  wrote  to  the  Philippians  in  a 
somewhat  different  meaning  indeed,  but 
which  come  in  very  aptly  here:  "Whatsoever 
things  are  true,  whatsoever  modest,  what- 
soever just,  whatsoever  holy,  whatsoever 
lovely,  whatsoever  of  good  fame,  if  there  be 
any  virtue,  if  any  praise  of  discipline,  think  on 
these  things"  (Phil,  iv,  8.)  and  speak  upon 
them  in  the  kind  commerce  of  family  talk. 

Let  us  descend  a  bit  more  into  particulars. 
To  put  it  all  in  a  nutshell,  one  would  like  to 
have  more  really  Catholic  talk  at  Catholic 
firesides.  By  Catholic  one  does  not  mean 
parish  talk,  nor  Church  talk,  still  less  talk 
merely  about  Catholic  men  and  women,  but 
38 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

talk  which  is  concerned  with  subjects  of  truly 
Catholic  interest,  and  inspired  with  Catholic 
feelings  and  Catholic  thought.  Like  it  or  not, 
we  Catholics  are  a  people  apart.  We  have 
our  own  spiritual  color,  our  own  character- 
istics, our  own  proper  beliefs  and  view-points 
and  principles.  Whatever  savors  of  these 
should  not  only  be  sacred  to  us,  but  interest- 
ing also,  and  should  make  some  matter  of 
our  daily  speech.  We  should  know  at  least 
the  current  history  of  Catholic  interests,  as  a 
good  citizen  knows  the  current  history  of  his 
native  land.  A  Catholic  who  does  not  care  to 
speak  of  Catholic  matters  is  a  far  worse 
anomaly  than  an  American  who  knows  and 
cares  nothing  for  American  interests  and 
affairs.  In  this  regard,  one  fears,  the  talk 
of  our  Catholic  homes  is  far  too  colorless. 
Mothers  and  fathers,  big  sisters  and  big 
brothers,  do  the  little  ones  at  home  gather 
from  your  daily  speech  that  deep  loyalty  and 
intelligent  interest,  that  steadfast  earnestness 
and  wide-awake  zeal  with  respect  to  things 
Catholic,  which  you  would  wish  them  to 
acquire  now  in  the  soft,  impressionable  days 
of  youth? 

One  might  here  mention  a  whole  host  of 
subjects    upon    which    Catholic    folk    should 
39 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

sometimes  think  and  speak  at  home,  but  one 
would  have  to  vary  it  a  bit  to  suit  every 
reader,  for  we  are  not  all  of  equal  wit,  nor 
have  we  all  the  same  interests,  nor  the  same 
cares,  nor  surroundings.  But  take  up  some 
good  Catholic  paper  and  glance  with  interest 
over  the  news  it  brings  of  Catholic  affairs 
and  doings  in  this  and  in  other  lands.  We 
find  there  letters  from  the  Holy  See  to  the 
faithful  of  Christendom,  tidings  of  Catholic 
enterprise  in  charitable  and  social  work,  in 
politics,  letters  and  art,  the  conquests  of  the 
Church's  missionaries,  the  achievements  of 
her  religious  orders  and  congregations,  the 
plans  and  doings  of  her  lay-folk,  a  thousand 
and  one  items  of  Catholic  bearing  and  signif- 
icance which  Catholic  readers  should  be  glad 
to  see. 

Truly,  to  most  of  us,  a  greater  interest  in 
Catholic  papers  would  give  a  finer,  fuller 
flow  of  Catholic  speech  and  Catholic  thought. 
Does  not  the  secular  press  feed  our  minds 
with  most  of  the  matter  for  our  casual  talk? 
If  we  would  only  read  more  Catholic  books 
and  let  the  Catholic  papers  give  us  more  food 
for  thought,  our  lips  would  blossom  easily 
enough  into  worthy  and  Catholic  speech 
abroad  and  at  home. 

40 


Our  Talk  at  Home 

I  think  I  hear  a  strong  cry  of  protest: 
"Why,  to  do  all  this,  we  should  have  to  begin 
and  educate  ourselves  all  over  again !"  A 
very  wise  observation  !  Perhaps  we  should ; 
but  is  it  not  worth  while,  for  the  sake  of  the 
holiness  and  happiness  of  our  own  home 
circle,  to  learn  all  over  again,  if  need  be,  the 
ways  and  topics  of  Catholic  speech?  It  may 
need  some  effort  and  watchfulness.  We  may 
have  at  first  often  to  repress  the  rising  word, 
or  discipline  the  frivolous  thought  —  but 
patience,  courage!  Every  effort  means  an 
easier  victory  next  time.  And  when  we  have 
thoroughly  reformed  and  disciplined  our 
speech  according  to  the  sane  and  blessed  lines 
of  Catholic  principles,  we  shall,  at  the  same 
time,  have  formed  our  minds  and  souls 
nearer  to  the  high  ideal  of  Christian  virtue. 
For,  "if  any  man  offend  not  in  word,  the 
same  is  a  perfect  man."  When  we  have 
learned  to  speak  as  we  should,  to  bear  our 
part  bravely,  kindly  and  tactfully  in  making 
pure  and  holy  the  atmosphere  of  our  homes, 
we  shall  indeed  have  become  true  apostles, 
mighty  influences  for  good  on  all  about  us. 
We  shall  have  learned  to  practise  one  of  the 
noblest  works  which  is  given  to  man  in  this 
world,  the  work  of  doing  good  to  others. 
41 


THE  COMMON  CATHOLIC 

T  is  a  weakness  of  our  poor  human  hearts 
to  wish  to  be  uncommon,  unusual, 
exceptional — distinguished  in  some  way  or 
other  from  the  men  around  us,  and  so  we 
shrink  from  any  term  which  links  us  all 
together,  all  us  poor  sons  and  daughters  of 
Adam,  upon  one  level  of  equality.  Men 
would  rather  be  bizarre,  extravagant  or  even 
wicked,  some  of  them,  than  be  common, 
ordinary  and  tamely  usual. 

So  there  is  many  a  one  who  finds  a  cold 
discouragement  in  the  thought  that  he  comes 
under  the  head  of  the  "common  Catholics" 
— that  the  work  to  which  God  has  called  him 
is  the  everyday  apostleship  of  the  common 
man.  We  grow  disheartened,  most  of  us, — 
we  are  sore  dispirited  and  listless,  and  lose 
all  hope  of  doing  anything  very  much  worth 
while  for  God  so  soon  as  we  remember  that 
we  are,  after  all,  only  one  of  the  great, 
uncounted  host  of  ordinary  men,  of  common 
Christians,  of  common  soldiers  of  God.  If 
this  listlessness,  this  despair  of  doing  any- 
thing truly  great  and  worthy  for  God's 
Church,  is  apt  to  chill  the  endeavor  of  all 
42 


The  Common  Catholic 

common  Christians,  who  do  not  feel  them- 
selves called  to  serve  God  and  His  Church 
in  the  priesthood  or  the  religious  life,  it  is 
especially  apt  to  discourage  and  deter  the 
lowly  and  simple  folk  among  us,  the  man 
and  woman  who  feel  that  their  talents,  their 
influence  or  their  opportunities  give  them  no 
weight  with  men,  and  that  they  are,  in  the 
full  sense  of  the  term,  only  very  common, 
obscure  and  uninfluential  folk  indeed. 

Yet  how  wrong  and  foolish  all  this  is! 
For  are  not  the  common  things  the  most 
necessary  and  important.  Are  battles  fought 
and  victories  won  without  the  aid  of  the 
common  soldier?  Let  us  look  with  God's 
eyes  upon  our  lot,  our  talents  and  our 
opportunities  and  we  shall  be  wonderfully 
cheered  and  encouraged — we  ordinary  men 
— and  heartened  to  do  manfully  and  well  the 
great  work  which  He  has  set  before  us,  and 
which  He  will  have  none  do  for  Him  but 
us,  ourselves. 

"God  must  love  the  common  people,"  quoth 
shrewd  old  Abraham  Lincoln,  "He  makes  so 
many  of  them."  And  in  its  way  the  saying 
holds  a  deal  of  truth.  For  what  God  loves 
in  us  is  not  our  petty  little  talents  or  riches 
or  distinctions,  unspeakably  small  and  trivial 
43 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

in  His  eyes ;  what  He  loves  in  us  is  our 
humanity,  made  to  His  image,  and  raised  by 
grace  to  be  in  a  wonderful  wav  His  very 
image  indeed! 

He  loves  us  as  common  men,  gifted  with 
His  grace,  plodding  through  weary  ways, 
toward  the  glory  of  our  common  Heaven ! 
Notice,  in  connections  such  as  this,  how  that 
poor  word  "common"  loses  all  its  low  and 
sorry  meanings  and  becomes  fit  to  describe 
even  the  glory  of  the  saints! 

God  loves  us  then,  all  of  us,  as  common 
men.  Our  differences  and  distinctions,  each 
from  each,  by  which  some  of  us  seem  to 
tower  mountain-high  above  the  rest,  are  as 
nothing  to  Him,  who  sees  all  things  as  they 
are.  It  is  our  own  poor  selves,  let  us  say  it 
once  again,  our  body  and  our  soul,  and  above 
all,  the  sanctifying  grace  which  He  has  given 
us  of  His  common  bounty,  that  makes  us 
precious  in  the  clear  eyes  of  God.  We  must 
realize  this  very  deeply  or  we  shall  never 
have  the  courage  to  do  the  work  God  wills. 
Let  us  bring  it  home  to  ourselves  by  some 
further  thoughts. 

Once  on  a  time  there  lived  about  the  lake 
Genesareth,  in  the  obscure  land  of  Palestine, 
twelve  to  all  outward  seeming  very  ordinary 
44 


The  Common  Catholic 

men.  There  was  Simon,  and  Andrew  his 
brother,  who  were  fishermen.  So,  too,  were 
John  and  James,  the  sons  of  Zebedee.  There 
was  Nathaniel,  of  Cana  in  Galilee,  an  out- 
of-the-way  country  place,  and  Philip  and 
Bartholomew  and  the  rest,  all  very  ordinary 
men.  Last  of  all  there  was  one  Levi,  a 
cursed  publican,  a  pariah  among  his  own 
people,  with  whom  perhaps  none  of  the  rest 
had  ever  spoken,  for  he  was  beneath  even 
their  social  level,  the  lowliest  of  common 
men.  Now  as  we  all  know,  it  was  these 
twelve  common  men  who  evangelized  the 
world !  How  did  it  happen  ?  We  know  the 
story  well.  Jesus  of  Nazareth  passed  by, 
and  called  them  to  be  His  disciples.  He 
taught  them  His  heavenly  doctrine.  He  bade 
them  go  abroad  over  the  earth  and  preach 
His  Kingdom  to  mankind. 

Better  men  than  they  might  well  have  been 
pardoned  for  drawing  back  in  fear;  but 
though  they  were  ordinary  men,  His  grace 
made  them  humble,  patient  and  obedient,  and 
they  went  forth  simply  and  trustingly  and 
changed  the  world. 

Of  course,  we  other  ordinary  men  and 
women  will  straightway  object,  that  these 
Apostles  touched  and  heard  the  Saviour,  the 
45 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Light  of  the  World,  that  they  had  their 
mission  from  His  very  lips,  that  the  Holy 
Spirit  of  God  descended  on  them,  and  that 
they  had  high  and  superhuman  powers  of 
miracles  and  prophecy.  But  so  have  you 
heard  Christ,  from  the  lips  of  His  priests, 
His  chosen  envoys ;  so  have  you  touched  Him 
(ah,  most  sweetly  and  efficaciously!)  in 
Holy  Communion;  so  has  God  given  you  a 
mission  to  spread  His  word,  if  you  will  only 
heed. 

Your  faith  is  your  mission,  which  must  be 
made  known  among  all  men,  among  the 
pagans  of  this  day,  as  among  the  pagans  of 
that  earlier  time.  Your  hope  is  your  mission 
which  gives  you  such  earnest  of  a  vast 
reward  for  your  brotherly  toil  for  other  men. 
Above  all,  your  charity  is  your  mission, 
which  stirs  you  up  to  love  God  and  your 
neighbor  with  a  sincere  heart,  diligent  to 
labor  and  suffer  in  bringing  your  neighbor  to 
the  love  of  God. 

And  the  Holy  Ghost?  He  has  been  with 
you  from  your  Baptism  unless  you  drove  Him 
from  you.  He  came  to  you  in  greater 
intimacy  in  Confirmation.  He  chose  you 
then  with  a  solemn  choice  to  be  soldiers  and 
apostles  of  Christ. 

46 


The  Common  Catholic 

As  for  the  miracles  and  the  prophecies, 
these  were  needful  to  the  Apostles,  because 
they  were  to  preach  a  new  and  a  hard 
doctrine  to  an  incredulous  world.  But  we, 
Christ's  lesser  apostles,  are  to  use  instead  of 
these  extraordinary  arguments,  the  simple 
persuasion  of  good  lives,  of  simple  charity, 
of  the  light  of  holiness  and  virtue  which  our 
deeds  are  to  make  to  shine  in  the  eyes  of  men 

Let  us  go  forth,  then,  you  and  I,  common 
men,  ordinary  men,  what  you  will,  as 
God  made  us  with  all  our  limitations, 
our  faults,  our  weaknesses.  Let  us  go 
forth,  honestly  and  simply,  to  the  divine 
and  holy  work  which  God  has  given 
us  to  do  in  this  world.  Let  us  go  forth  and 
quietly,  earnestly,  tenderly  speak  with  our 
brothers  and  sisters,  common  men  and 
women  like  ourselves.  They  are  exceedingly 
many,  and  very  needy  and  blind  and  poor  in 
the  goods  of  life  eternal,  and  we  have  the 
light  and  the  doctrine,  the  wisdom  and  riches 
of  Christ's  true  Faith.  We  have  that  to  give 
them  for  want  of  which  they  languish  in 
darkness — and  we  can  so  easily  give  it  by  our 
everyday  example,  our  words  and  our  deeds. 

Let  us  by  our  deeds  no  less  than  by  our 
words  tell  them  of  that  Christ  who,  being 
47 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

the  serene  and  all-sufficient  God,  became,  as 
it  were,  a  common  man  among  us  out  of  His 
eternal  tenderness  and  pity,  having  compas- 
sion upon  us  all,  upon  us  common  men.  Let 
us  tell  them  that  He  has  come  to  rescue  and 
redeem  our  common  humanity,  to  solve  our 
common  problems,  to  show  us  the  price  and 
value  of  our  lives,  and  all  the  priceless 
opportunities  that  lie  about  us  in  the  world, 
about  us  common  men. 

Indeed,  as  we  have  said  before,  if  we  push 
the  meaning  of  this  term  "common"  a  little 
farther,  perhaps  one  might  bring  all  mankind 
within  its  compass  and  might  say  that  we  are 
all  of  us  only  this,  in  His  vision,  the  best 
and  the  worst  of  us  alike,  only  common  and 
ordinary  men.  We  may  have  genius  to  make 
a  tinkle  in  the  ears  of  the  world;  but  in  His 
ears  our  wit  and  our  wisdom  are  all  very 
foolish  and  shallow  indeed,  the  prattle  of 
babes.  We  may  have  wealth,  station,  power; 
but  in  His  sight  we  wither  like  grass.  We 
may  even  be  prelates  or  princes,  wise  or  holy 
in  men's  esteem;  but  in  His  eyes  we  are  but 
poor,  pitiful  little  ones,  common  men  whom 
He  came  to  rescue  from  a  common  ruin  that 
would  have  swallowed  us  all. 

So  each  one  of  us  shall  be  saved  by  His 
48 


The  Common  Catholic 

mercy,  not  as  great  men,  or  rich,  nor  as  poor 
or  little,  but  merely  as  what  we  are — common 
men !  It  is  our  humanity  that  we  take  with 
us  to  Heaven ;  if  we  are  not  saved  as  common 
men.  vain  indeed  will  have  been  all  the 
uncommon  things  we  boasted  of  in  this  world ! 

It  was  this  thought  that  made  the  great 
heart  of  St.  Paul  groan  out,  in  the  midst  of 
his  labors,  "lest  perhaps  having  preached  to 
others,  I  myself  should  become  a  castaway !" 
The  seer,  the  prophet,  the  apostle,  under  the 
robe  of  all  these  Heaven-sent  dignities,  there 
lived  and  breathed,  there  prayed  and  suffered, 
only  a  common  man,  solicitous  for  his  soul ! 

As  we  are  to  be  saved  as  common  men,  so 
must  we  serve  God,  so  may  we  save  other 
men  and  bring  them  with  ourselves  to 
Heaven.  The  appeal  of  our  human  kind- 
ness, sincerity  and  love  will  win  them  over, 
our  homely  and  familiar  talk  will  sink 
conviction  into  their  souls,  the  power  of  our 
everyday  example  will  bring  them  to  believe 
that  Christian  goodness  is  possible,  will 
move  them  to  own  that  it  is  sweet  and  lovely 
and  holy,  will  make  them  yearn  to  bring  it 
into  their  own  hearts  and  lives.  The  grasp 
of  our  hands  will  cheer  and  reassure  them ; 
we  shall  win  them  by  our  common  and 
49 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

familiar  words  and  deeds,  of  brotherliness, 
faith  and  love. 

Such  reflections  as  these  have  served  to 
make  great  men  humble,  when  they  reflected 
how  small  and  ordinary  they  must  seem  in 
the  eyes  of  God.  But  they  should  have 
power,  too,  to  stir  up  and  hearten  to  heroic 
effort  the  man  who  knows  that  he  is  not 
greatly  gifted  with  power,  talent  and  influence 
to  aid  his  fellow-men. 

Not  one  of  us,  however  lowly  and  undis- 
tinguished, who  dwells  seriously  on  these 
thoughts  should  fail  to  find  in  them  encour- 
agement and  cheer  to  take  up  the  work  which 
God  has  cut  out  for  him,  among  the  men 
and  women  who  make  up  the  circle  of  his 
little  world,  to  enter  boldly  on  his  own 
especial  field  of  apostleship.  If  we  could 
only  bring  those  great  numbers  of  Catholic 
men  and  women,  who  form  the  noble  ranks 
of  the  common  faithful,  to  realize  deeply 
their  opportunities  and  their  powers,  how 
soon  their  valiant  efforts  could  change  the 
face  of  the  earth! 

For     only     think     of     the     numbers,     the 

influence,  of  all  our  countless  multitudes  of 

plain    and    simple    Catholics    throughout    the 

world!     They  are  everywhere;  they  speak  to 

50 


The  Common  Catholic 

everyone;  everyone  is  their  acquaintance; 
everyone  is  their  friend.  Wherever  toilers 
or  feasters  or  players  are  gathered  together, 
wherever  work  is  being  done,  or  recreations 
are  afoot,  or  men  are  talking  to  one  another; 
in  car  or  factory  or  office  or  club,  the  common 
Catholic  is  there.  He  rubs  shoulders  with 
all  men;  he  is  rich  among  the  rich  and  poor 
with  the  poor,  simple  with  the  simple  and 
learned  among  the  learned ;  in  a  word,  he  is, 
by  his  very  multiplicity  and  variety  and 
omnipresence  what  the  great  Apostle  strove 
ever  to  be,  "all  things  to  all  men."  How 
endless,  then,  and  how  various  are  the 
opportunities  of  his  apostleship!  Where  the 
priest  may  not  enter  unsuspected,  he  is 
already  there  a  familiar  and  a  friend.  His 
common  talk  is  listened  to  with  interest  and 
without  suspicion;  his  testimony  is  accepted, 
his  teaching  will  pass  current  as  the  word  of 
a  friend.  Without  suspicion,  without  preju- 
dice, he  can,  if  he  be  prudent  and  tactful, 
preach  the  saving  truths  of  his  Faith  in  a 
thousand  places,  where  the  word  of  a  priest 
of  God  would  be  met  only  with  anger,  or 
distrust,  or  disdain. 

If  we  only  can  enlist,  somehow,  the  aid  of 
the  common  man !     If  we  can  only  awaken 
51 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

in  him  a  sense  of  his  high  privileges  and 
noble  opportunities,  and  set  him  in  the  way 
of  helping  his  fellow-men,  what  great  good 
we  shall  gain  for  the  Church,  and  therefore 
for  the  world ! 

Yet,  let  us  say  it  again  in  sadness,  the 
great  pity  is  that  most  men  who  realize  that 
they  come  under  the  category  of  common 
Christians,  of  ordinary  Catholics,  that  they 
are  in  no  wise  distinguished  from  the  great 
mass  of  the  faithful,  either  in  learning,  or 
influence,  or  authority,  or  position,  or  power 
of  any  kind,  are  apt  to  be  so  very  easily 
discouraged  and  lose  heart  for  any  effort  to 
better  the  world.  They  go  indeed,  only  too 
often,  to  a  sad  extreme  of  what  one  may  call 
spiritual  do-nothingness.  Far  from  exer- 
cising any  apostleship  among  their  fellow- 
men,  their  only  ambition  seems  to  be  to  keep 
as  passive  and  as  quiet  as  possible  in  matters 
of  religion,  and  to  leave  the  whole  burden  of 
spreading  the  knowledge  of  the  faith,  of 
fighting  truth's  battles,  and  upholding  the 
honor  of  the  Church  "to  those  who  are  better 
fit" — by  which  they  commonly  mean  the 
priests ! 

Others  still,  of  the  ordinary  faithful,  are 
bewildered  when  they  are  told  that  they  have 
52 


The  Common  Catholic 

a  mission  or  an  apostleship  to  this  poor, 
weak,  wicked  world !  What  should  they  do  ? 
Where  shall  they  begin?  Who  will  listen  to 
them?  Between  these  two  attitudes  of  mind, 
there  are  a  hundred  others,  all  the  various 
shades  of  discouragement,  bewilderment, 
indifference,  and  (shall  we  say  it?)  laziness 
too; — which  keep  our  ordinary  Catholics 
from  coming  forward  to  take  up  the  labors 
of  this  great  apostleship.  Now  and  again 
you  do  find  one  or  another  simple  layman 
who  has  been  touched  by  God's  grace  and 
stirred  by  some  prudent  counsel  and  sugges- 
tion, to  try  his  hand  at  spreading  the  Faith. 
If  such  a  one  is  wise,  and  tactful,  and 
persistent  what  a  great  deal  he  can  do!  He 
grows  surprised  himself  at  his  own  accom- 
plishment. He  becomes  a  living  proof  of 
what  we  said  in  the  beginning  about  the 
power  of  the  common  man.  He  penetrates 
where  God's  priest  could  never  find  admit- 
tance; he  is  heard  and  believed,  trusted  and 
followed  by  men  who  would  resent  and 
suspect  the  intrusion  of  any  minister  of 
religion  whatsoever,  in  their  lives. 

But    these    zealous,    enlightened,    prudent 
apostles  are  still,  alas,  all  too  few  among  our 
common    Catholic    men    and    women.      The 
53 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

great  majority,  with  all  their  great  powers 
unrealized  and  unused,  are  waiting,  discour- 
aged and  obscure,  for  the  suggestion  and 
appeal  which  might  launch  them  upon  their 
labors  for  God  and  for  His  Church  and  for 
the  world. 

In  conclusion,  then,  it  is  to  you,  dear 
Catholic  reader,  whoever  or  wherever  you 
may  be,  that  these  thoughts  should  have  a 
poignant  and  urgent  appeal.  You  are  one  of 
that  chosen  people  to  whom  Jesus  Christ  has 
given  the  charge  of  letting  your  light  shine 
before  men,  that  they  may  glorify  your 
Father  who  is  in  Heaven.  You  are  one  of 
those  to  whom  St.  Peter's  words  are  said, 
ringing  down  the  ages:  "You  are  a  chosen 
generation,  a  kingly  priesthood,  a  holy  nation, 
a  purchased  people :  that  you  may  declare  His 
virtues  who  hath  called  you  out  of  darkness 
into  His  marvelous  light."  You,  whoever 
you  may  be,  are  one  of  those  everyday 
apostles  to  whom  is  entrusted  for  good  or  ill 
the  soul's  welfare  of  scores,  perhaps  of 
hundreds  and  thousands  of  your  fellow-men. 

The  field  of  your  labors  for  God  lies  all 

about  you.     It  is  the  world  you  live  in,  the 

men,   women   and    children   you   meet   every 

day  in  familiar  intercourse,  at  home,  at  your 

54 


The  Common  Catholic 

work,  abroad.  Their  eyes  are  upon  you. 
Their  ears  are  listening  for  your  teaching. 
You  cannot  help  moving,  teaching,  leading 
them,  either  for  good  or  for  evil.  Be  a 
consistent,  whole-hearted,  faithful  Catholic, 
speak  and  act  and  think  and  love  as  your 
faith  and  your  conscience  bid  you,  and  you 
lead  them  irresistibly  toward  the  truth, 
toward  God  and  Heaven.  Speak  to  them 
tactfully  and  kindly  of  the  Faith  that  is  in 
you,  and  your  holy  example  will  give  your 
words  a  weight  they  cannot  resist  or  gainsay. 
But  lead  a  life  like  the  rest  of  men,  follow 
their  foolish  ways,  dissemble  your  lofty 
principles,  yield  to  hate  and  envy,  and  greed, 
and  lust  because  "everybody  does,"  and 
you  quench  a  great  light  out  of  the  world. 
You  are  a  lesser  Judas,  a  traitor-apostle. 
You  preach  to  men,  at  least  in  action,  that 
Christ's  doctrine  is  only  a  lovely  theory,  His 
faith  an  amiable  myth,  His  mission  to  men 
a  pleasant  and  impracticable  dream.  You 
quench  and  smother,  so  far  as  in  you  lies, 
the  flame  that  should  kindle  the  world! 


55 


THE  APOSTLESHIP  OF 
ENCOURAGEMENT 

NEW  YEAR,  following  as  it  does  so 
close  upon  the  Christmas  season,  finds 
/our  hearts  open  and  warm  for  all  good 
resolves  and  thoughts  of  Christian  charity. 
Christmas,  which  is  above  all  the  feast  of 
love,  has  filled  us  so  full  with  kindliness  and 
good  will  that  we  look  for  some  ready  way 
of  showing  to  our  neighbor  our  friendliness 
and  good  feeling.  Well,  there  is  one  way  at 
our  hand,  easy,  practical  and  fruitful.  Let  us 
spend  a  while  thinking  it  over  together,  and 
we  shall  call  it  for  short  the  Apostlesbip  of 
Encouragement. 

We  mortals  are  all  of  us  glad  enough  our- 
selves for  any  bit  of  helpful,  honest  encour- 
agement that  comes  our  way,  and  we  like 
to  have  every  one  hearten  us  and  cheer  us 
on.  As  to  heartening  other  folk,  and  cheer- 
ing them  on,  that's  another  matter.  We 
don't  see  our  way  to  do  it  tactfully,  or  they 
might  not  value  our  encouragement  if  it 
were  given,  or  it  might  seem  an  intrusion, 
or  perhaps  it  never  even  enters  our  heads 
that  they  stand  in  need  of  any  help  or  cheer 
56 


On  the  Road  to  Emmaus 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

from  us  at  all.  These  are,  alas,  the  common 
attitudes  of  mind  towards  this  important 
matter  of  lending  hope  and  countenance  to 
other  men;  these  are  the  reasons  why  there 
is  too  little  of  this  great  good  in  the  world. 

If  you  go  back  a  bit  in  your  experience, 
and  grow  meditative  about  yourself  and  the 
people  you  have  known,  you  will  very  shortly 
realize,  I  think,  that  you  and  they  have 
suffered  a  great  deal  at  certain  portions  of 
your  life  from  mere,  downright  discourage- 
ment. You  may  not  have  been  quite 
conscious  at  the  time  of  what  it  was  that 
leaded  down  your  feet,  or  lay  like  a  weight 
above  your  heart.  You  were  young,  per- 
haps, and  great  designs  had  been  forming  in 
your  fervid  mind  of  doing  worthy  deeds  and 
greatly  helping  on  your  fellow-men.  Possibly 
your  dreams  had  not  much  weight  and  wrork- 
a-day  substance  to  them,  but  they  were  evi- 
dence of  a  good  will  and  a  lofty  purpose, 
precious  things  which,  when  well  directed, 
do  avail  to  uplift  and  purify  the  world. 

But  there  came  a  day,  perhaps  it  was  after 
you  had  tried  some  too  ambitious  flight  and 
fallen  rudely,  when  your  great  resolves  sud- 
denly faltered  and  flagged.  You  woke  to  a 
sorrowful  and  half  despairing  realization  of 
57 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

your  own  scant  equipment  for  anything  really 
noble  and  great.  You  found  out  the  height 
and  the  distance  of  those  delectable  moun- 
tains which  had  before  seemed  so  easy  and 
so  near.  And  so,  seeing  no  way  before  you, 
you  bitterly  cursed  the  mirage  that  bad  led 
you  into  this  desert  of  discouragement,  and 
perhaps  you  turned  your  back  in  sullen  dis- 
illusionment on  all  the  heroic  aspirations  and 
settled  down  to  lead  a  humdrum  life  of  easy 
mediocrity,  like  the  greater  part  of  the 
unheroic  world. 

Oh,  if  there  had  been  some  one  there, 
some  wise  and  patient  and  tender  heart  who 
could  have  rallied  and  reassured  you  and 
tided  you  over  this  first  bitter  stroke  of 
withering  discouragement !  If  some  one  had 
only  been  there  to  remind  you  that  the 
greatest  of  men  often  failed  miserably  in 
beginnings,  and  that  battles  are  only  won 
with  many  bruises  and  blows!  All  you 
required  was  a  little  cheerful  encouragement, 
a  little  elasticity  of  spirit,  and  there  would 
have  been  a  new  start  with  better  plans  and 
securer  guidance  along  the  upward  grade. 
But,  alas,  no  one  spoke  to  any  purpose,  no 
one  vouchsafed  the  tiny  word  of  wise  encour- 
agement and  cheer  which  you  needed  to  help 
58 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

you  over  that  perilous  and  critical  pass,  and 
so  you  are  what  you  are,  instead  of  being  the 
noble  thing  you  had  meant  and  hoped  and 
planned. 

This  manner  of  tragedy  is  very  common 
in  men's  lives.  Sometimes  it  is  a  purpose 
and  effort  towards  merely  temporal  honor 
and  service,  that  faints  and  fails  for  want 
of  due  encouragement.  How  many  a  lad 
who  had  hoped  to  be  a  doughty  soldier  or  a 
mighty  statesman  has  given  up  and  meekly 
gone  to  keeping  dusty  ledgers,  because  he 
found  no  help  in  his  necessity  when  his  soul 
was  sick  and  weary  for  the  encouragement 
of  a  friend ! 

Over  these  merely  temporal  losses  and 
calamities  we  need  not  grieve  so  much. 
Sometimes  they  are  not  really  calamities  or 
losses  at  all;  for  they  turn  a  man's  eyes  from 
the  things  of  time  and  set  him  gazing  towards 
eternity.  It  is  the  spiritual  and  eternal  losses 
we  must  deplore,  and  how  many  of  these, 
how  very  many  indeed,  come  from  a  lack  of 
due  encouragement ! 

"We  live  by  admiration,  hope  and  love," 
cries  Wordsworth  in  a  famous  poem,  and  to 
be  sure  a  great  part  of  our  vigor,  earnest- 
ness and  courage  in  entering  on  nobler  lives 
59 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

and  living  up  to  better  resolutions  comes 
from  the  warm,  bright  hopes  we  cherish, 
and  our  glowing  anticipations  of  success  to 
be.  This  is  all  natural  and  proper  and  good. 
It  is  so  that  God  made  us  and  it  is  so,  too, 
that  intelligent  beings,  who  act  for  an  end, 
must  cheer  themselves  and  be  cheered  on 
past  the  trials  and  miseries  that  wait  like 
lions  in  the  way.  Holy  contemplatives  have 
even  loved  to  think  that  the  angel  who  came 
to  comfort  our  Lord  after  His  agony  was 
sent  to  bring  vividly  before  His  human  soul 
the  immense  and  everlasting  joy  and  glory 
He  was  to  win  by  His  depths  of  suffering 
and  humiliation.  If  this  is  true,  as  they  have 
lovingly  imagined,  if  He,  the  All-sufficient, 
the  All-strong,  vouchsafed  to  let  a  creature 
of  His  will  minister  to  Him,  and  encourage 
and  console  Him,  is  it  any  wonder  that  we, 
who  are  pitifully  weak  and  dependent,  should 
sometimes  need  the  cheer  and  encouragement 
of  our  fellow-men  to  help  us  on  through  our 
small  agonies? 

Our  neighbor's  need  in  his  discouragement 
is,  then,  it  is  clear,  our  own  golden  opportu- 
nity. It  opens  to  us  an  easy  and  a  glorious 
apostleship  which  the  simplest  and  the  low- 
liest of  us  all  may  practise  very  effectively, 
60 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

and  which  tactfully  and  lovingly  pursued, 
will  make  us  true  ministering  angels  to  our 
fellow-men.  How  thick  the  opportunities  for 
this  blessed  apostleship  lie  round  about  us  all ! 

First  of  all  let  us  look  around  us  in  our 
own  homes,  at  our  own  firesides,  and  see 
whether  some  precious  occasions  for  it  are 
not  waiting  ready  to  our  hand.  It  may  be, 
for  instance,  that  we  have  long  been  trying 
to  influence  for  good  some  brother  or  sister 
of  ours,  some  near  relative  or  intimate  friend. 

Perhaps  we  may  fancy  to  ourselves  that 
we  have  done  everything  that  flesh  and  blood 
can  do,  to  work  out  our  beneficent  designs. 
We  have  suggested,  advised,  exhorted,  admon- 
ished, even  scolded,  been  friendly  and  severe 
by  turns,  but  all  to  no  avail.  We  have  tried 
the  direct  ways  and  the  round-about  ways, 
have  used  ingenuity  and  bluntness  and  finesse 
and  subtlety  and  persuasion,  all  the  loving 
means  and  all  the  hard  ones,  but  still  to  no 
avail !  Now  let  us  ask  ourselves  one  most 
weighty  question  more.  Have  we,  have  we 
ever,  tried  true  and  genuine  encouragement? 
To  get  any  one  to  make  a  real  effort  towards 
bettering  himself,  is  it  not  clear  that  one  of 
the  very  first  requisites  is  to  get  him  to  believe 
strongly  and  hope  vividly  that  he  can  sbme- 
61 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

how  be  a  better  man?  This  seems  a  truism, 
perhaps,  but  it  is  often  overlooked  by  sage 
admonitors.  We  are  too  likely  to  forget,  in 
our  superior  way,  that  it  is  mere  downright 
discouragement  and  dispiritedness  about 
themselves  and  their  own  possibilities  of 
reform  which  keeps  many,  many  poor  sinners 
groveling  in  their  sin.  Once  get  a  man  into 
a  hopeful,  eager  spirit  with  himself,  keen  and 
sanguine  about  his  own  chances  of  improve- 
ment, and  you  have  given  him  an  immense 
lift  along  the  paths  of  righteousness  and 
perfection. 

Try  once  more,  then,  with  these  friends  of 
yours,  and  try  this  time  with  the  gentle,  irre- 
sistible means  of  cordial  and  tactful  encour- 
agement. Cordial  and  tactful — we  may  well 
dwell  a  while  on  these  two  words,  for  they 
hold  in  themselves  the  essence  of  true  encour- 
aging. It  must  be  cordial,  full  of  heart.  It 
must  spring  from  no  other  wish,  desire  or 
impulse  than  genuine  love.  Love,  and  unself- 
ish, Christian,  patient,  generous  love,  must 
be  its  well-spring,  its  motive  and  inspiration. 
Then  it  will  not  intrude  nor  offend  nor  defeat 
its  own  purpose  by  ill-concealed  arrogance  or 
assumed  superiority.  It  will  not  wound 
instead  of  healing,  nor  weary  instead  of 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

giving  cheer.  Secondly,  it  must  be  tactful; 
not  intrusive,  nor  ill-timed  nor  insistent,  nor 
self-important  nor  importunate,  all  of  which 
ugly  things  spring  from,  and  smell  of,  the 
musty  soil  of  selfishness. 

Now  that  we  are  speaking  of  the  things 
that  encouragement  does  not  mean,  let  us 
put  in  just  one  word  of  caution  more. 
Encouragement  does  not  mean  flattery  nor 
insincere  approval,  nor  even  what  is  gener- 
ally known  as  praise.  To  praise  a  man  to 
his  face,  even  to  flatter  him,  is  indeed  a  sort 
of  encouragement,  but  it  is  too  often  not  a 
good  sort  at  all.  It  is  a  great  deal  like  those 
narcotic  stimulants,  that  can  indeed  heighten 
the  heart  and  screw  up  the  courage  for  a 
while,  but  soon  fail  and  leave  a  sense  of 
weariness  and  languor  and  a  fiercer  craving 
after  more  of  the  same  unhealthy  stimulus. 
The  encouragement  we  speak  of  is  sensible, 
homely  and  moderate,  sincere  and  true,  and 
therefore  effective  and  enduring.  If  it 
praises,  it  praises  modestly  and  truly,  choos- 
ing rather  to  praise  the  deed  than  the  man 
who  does  it,  not  drawing  invidious  compari- 
sons. It  consists  in  heartening  our  brother, 
bringing  him  with  word  and  deed  to  the  true 
and  healthy  optimism  which  is  patient  of  toil 
63 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

and  failure,  because  by  God's  help  it  trusts 
in  victory  at  the  end.  Life  as  God  sees  it  is 
always  encouraging — a  very  field  of  glorious 
opportunities,  and  therefore  true  Christian 
encouragement  is  making  the  disheartened 
and  weary  see  the  world  through  the  ever- 
cheerful  eyes  of  its  Creator  and  its  Lord. 

"But  if  one  has  to  be  so  careful  and  cir- 
cumspect about  it,  it  might  be  a  great  deal 
better  not  to  try  to  encourage  other  folks  at 
all !" 

Oh,  no,  dear  interlocutor,  it  is  always 
better  to  try !  To  twist  a  bit  the  saying  of 
St.  Francis  de  Sales,  it  is  better  by  far  to 
encourage  with  imperfection  than  not  to 
encourage  at  all.  With  good  will  and  a  little 
prudent  thinking  over  what  we  have  done, 
we  shall  soon  come  to  have  some  skill  in 
this  noble  art  of  encouragement.  What  a  day 
that  will  be,  when  at  our  poor  words  and 
looks  we  see  cheeks  flush  and  eyes  brighten 
with  noble  energy  and  courage,  where  there 
was  before  only  dull  down-heartedness  and  a 
sort  of  gloomy  half-despair! 

If  we  think  that  we  are  not  any  way  fitted 

to  exercise  this  great  apostleship,  we  should 

make  it  a  subject  of  our  prayers  to  God  and 

beg  Him  to  give  us  the  heart  and  the  tact  and 

64 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

the  will  to  carry  the  work  along  all  through 
our  lives.  For  in  all  the  range  of  fruitful 
apostleships  there  are  few  more  blessed  than 
this. 

It  would  be  pleasant  to  descend  to  many 
details  and  reflect  a  while  on  some  particular 
occasions  for  this  Apostleship  of  Encourage- 
ment, which  come  in  the  way  of  nearly  all 
of  tts  some  time  or  other  during  our  lives. 
There  are  the  young  folk — who  seem  so 
abundantly  blessed  already  with  life,  spirits 
and  hope,  that  many  an  elder  man  or  woman 
thinks  sighingly  that  they  at  least  are  in  very 
little  need  of  encouragement.  But  it  is  not 
true.  It  is  the  young  who  need  encourage- 
ment most,  perhaps,  of  all;  for  they  are  new 
to  themselves  and  to  the  world.  They  have 
no  memories  of  deeds  well  done  to  cheer  and 
hearten  them  and  make  them  believe  a  little 
in  their  own  capacity  and  powers.  They 
have  not  settled  station  and  footing  among 
men  to  give  them  strength.  They  need  some 
kindly  voice,  some  friendly  eye  to  reassure 
and  stir  them  to  confidence  and  hope.  A 
word  of  encouragement,  a  little  word  of 
appreciation,  then,  at  the  critical  time  in  their 
young  fortunes  may  have  a  world  of  meaning 
and  value  in  their  eyes,  may  make  them  your 
65 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

debtors  for  life,  and  enshrine  you  in  their 
loving  memories  through  all  the  changes  of 
after  years. 

Have  the  old  no  need  of  encouragement? 
Be  sure  they  have!  Every  one  has,  who  is 
plodding  along  through  this  world.  It  is  true 
that  their  discouragements  are  likely  to  be 
quite  different  from  those  which  chill  and 
depress  the  mercurial  heart  of  youth.  They 
suffer  from  weariness,  disillusionment  and 
regret.  They  can  no  longer  stir  themselves 
to  fresh  endeavors  and  new  virtues  and  holi- 
ness, by  thinking  of  the  years  to  be;  for 
with  them  there  are  no  years  to  be.  All 
their  long  days  are  spread  behind  them! 
And  they  look  back  upon  past  years  with 
uneasiness  and  pain.  The  opportunities 
they  wasted,  the  good  deeds  they  have  left 
undone  and  the  evil  they  have  never  atoned 
for,  rise  up  and  haunt  them  now,  so  that 
they,  too,  like  the  young  (though  for  different 
reasons),  often  stand  sorely  in  need  of 
encouragement  and  cheer. 

The  middle-aged  stand  on  the  great  divide 
of  life  facing  the  westering  sun,  midway 
betwixt  youth  and  old  age,  and  the  discour- 
agement of  both  those  times  of  life  assails 
them  by  turns,  and  so  they  are  often  in  need 
M 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

of  some  cheer  and  heartening  too.  To  put 
it  all  in  a  word,  most  of  the  world  about  us 
— and  particularly  when  it  comes  to  a  ques- 
tion of  earnest  and  exceptional  efforts 
towards  greater  holiness  and  virtue,  is  plod- 
ding along  in  a  more  or  less  chronic  state  of 
mild  discouragement.  Many  a  careless-seem- 
ing and  loose-living  man  is  really  deeply  con- 
cerned down  in  his  own  heart  about  his 
spiritual  welfare  and  anxious,  in  a  vague 
and  indefinite  sort  of  way,  to  be  a  better 
fellow  and  rise  out  of  his  sin.  What  keeps 
him  back  from  making  some  definite  effort 
to  improve  is  a  despondent  feeling  that  all 
he  can  do  will  be  of  small  avail.  Religion 
seems  to  him  a  sombre  thing,  breathing  only 
punishment  and  gloom.  To  show  him  the 
cheerful  and  consoling  side  of  Christ's  sweet 
message  is  to  lift  him  up  and  urge  him  on 
most  efficaciously  to  better  things. 

Let  us  set  ourselves,  then,  steadfastly, 
prudently  and  tenderly  to  take  up  this  holy 
apostleship  of  cheering  on  our  fellow-men 
in  the  ways  of  virtuous  effort.  Let  us  join 
the  ranks  of  those  noble  hearts,  alas  too  few, 
whose  minds  are  forever  busy  in  conjuring  up 
and  putting  to  test  ingenious  and  tender  ways 
to  help  and  cheer  along  their  neighbor  in  the 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

sometimes  steep  and  arduous  ways  of  God's 
service  and  love. 

There  is  one  such  man  hid  away  in  a  large 
city  of  this  land  of  ours  whose  story  may 
well  conclude  our  thoughts  on  the  Apostleship 
of  Encouragement.  He  is  an  old  man  now 
in  years  and  experience.  Men  say  that  he 
himself  in  his  younger  days  was  the  victim 
of  a  great  discouragement  which  nearly 
ruined  him,  but  by  a  great  effort  and  by 
God's  grace  he  overcame  the  sour  poison  in 
his  veins  and  turned  it  into  sweetness.  Now 
his  doorstep  is  worn  by  the  feet  of  many  men 
•and  women,  young  men  and  women  for  the 
most  part,  who  have  learned  the  way  to  that 
humble  threshold  as  to  a  door  to  cheeriness 
and  hope.  One  tells  the  other — no  man 
knows  how  the  good  word  passes — but  there 
they  come.  And  how  he  cheers  and  heartens 
them,  that  simple  little  old  man!  He  is 
stricken  now  by  a  lingering  malady.  He  sits 
all  day  in  an  old  arm-chair  which  his  faithful 
man  wheels  around  to  keep  it  in  the  sun- 
shine. But  for  all  the  twinges  of  pain  'that 
rack  him,  there  is  always  a  flute-like  quality 
to  his  voice  that  rings  like  cheerful  music, 
there  is  a  contagious  merriment  in  his  eye 
that  turns  the  blue  devils  out  of  windows 
68 


The  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 

and  tunes  up  the  cockles  of  the  heart  like 
generous  wine.  How  much  good  this  old  man 
does  I  should  not  like  to  try  to  set  down. 
How  far  his  Apostleship  of  Encouragement 
and  Cheer  has  reached  out  into  the  world 
no  one  on  earth  can  guess.  But  there  he  sits 
clay  in  and  clay  out,  dispensing  spiritual  sun- 
shine. Some  of  his  friends  suspect  (but  I 
think  no  one  has  ever  dared  to  ask  him),  that 
a  great  deal  of  that  encouraging  and  sympa- 
thetic temper  of  his  is  due  to  a  resolution 
(an  agonized  and  awful  resolution  it  must 
have  been)  taken  while  he  was  yet  sore  and 
quivering  from  that  great  discouragement  of 
his  early  years,  that  he  would  never  let  a 
chance  go  by  to  hearten  and  inspire  the  low- 
spirited  and  the  timid  by  generous  sympathy. 
How  much  happier  and  holier  the  world 
would  soon  become  if  every  one  who  has 
fallen  victim  to  discouragement  himself 
would  straightway  take  a  similar  resolution! 
For  encouragement, — and  this  reflection 
shall  be  our  last, — is  a  great  deal  like  mercy 
in  the  poet's  saying:  "It  blesses  him  who 
gives  and  him  who  takes."  To  be  truly 
encouraging  one  must  keep  his  own  soul  in 
an  atmosphere  of  cheery  and  healthy  optim- 
ism. To  exorcise  the  imp  of  dejection  from 
69 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

another,  one  must  first  shake  free  from  his 
dark  and  ugly  sway  one's  self. 

It  is  a  very  common  counsel,  when  we  are 
sad,  to  go  and  try  to  cheer  some  other 
mourner.  Why  not  turn  the  same  shrewd 
advice  to  our  present  matter  and  shake  off 
our  own  discouragement  if  need  be,  by 
trying  to  encourage  some  one  else?  What 
a  pleasant  and  holy  place  the  world  would 
be  if  every  one  set  himself  manfully  to  work 
to  encourage  goodness  and  virtue  in  all  his 
neighbors!  No  more  sorry  looks  and  envious 
glances.  No  more  chilling  indifference,  or 
carping  criticism  or  odious  back-biting  or 
sneering  opposition  to  good  and  virtuous 
deeds.  But  everywhere,  on  all  hands,  a 
sunny,  cheerful  good- will  and  charity  that 
warms  the  heart,  and  makes  virtue,  goodness 
and  brave  endeavor  a  hundred  times  easier, 
more  sturdy  and  effective.  A  general  atmos- 
phere, in  a  word,  of  holy  and  Christian 
charity,  for  after  all  true  charity,  truly 
understood,  always  spells  encouragement. 


THE  POWER  OF  PRAISE 

FROM  the  Apostleship  of  Encourage- 
ment one  passes  on  very  naturally  to 
think  of  the  Apostleship  of  Praise.  "Why," 
I  think  I  hear  some  one  say,  "aren't  they 
.quite  the  same  thing?"  No,  not  quite  the 
same,  although  their  spheres  do  overlap  in 
many  places.  For  one  may  encourage  a 
person  without  praising  him,  though  on  the 
other  hand,  as  we  shall  see,  it  is  hardly 
possible  to  praise  in  the  way  we  mean,  with- 
out at  the  same  time  giving  some  encourage- 
ment. 

To  begin  with,  let  us  hedge  in  our  field  a 
little.  For  there  is  praise  and  praise,  and 
we  must  not  take  too  wide  a  stint  to  plow 
out  of  such  an  expansive  subject. 

To  praise,  then,  is  in  general  to  express 
our  approval  and  commendation  of  a  person 
or  a  thing.  So  much  even  the  dictionary  can 
tell  us.  But  how  many  kinds  and  shades  and 
subdivisions  there  are  in  praise!  First  of  all, 
there  is  praise  honest  and  sincere,  and  praise 
hollow,  insincere  and  of  the  false  lips  merely. 
This  last  we  mention  only  to  fling  it  far 
aside,  for  it  does  no  good  to  giver  or  to 
71 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

taker,  but  only  evil.  Then  there  is  the  hearty, 
whole-souled  praise,  which  carries  a  convic- 
tion of  our  sincerity,  and  faint,  grudging, 
qualified  praise,  such  as  we  speak  of  in  the 
good  old  saying  about  "damning  with  faint 
praise."  Again,  there  is  injudicious  praise, 
intemperate  and  effusive,  which  spoils  the 
truth  of  one  saying  by  the  exaggeration  and 
fulsome  flattery  of  the  next ;  and  there  is 
timely,  tactful,  refined  and  temperate  praise, 
which  comes  easily  and  modestly  from  a 
sincere  and  unselfish  heart.  Last  of  all,  and 
most  important  for  our  purpose,  is  another 
division — sharper  and  more  easily  recogniz- 
able perhaps  than  any  of  the  preceding  kinds, 
— between  "praising  one  to  his  face,"  as  we 
say,  or  in  other  words,  between  the  praise 
we  address  to  someone  who  is  present  and 
is  listening  to  us, — and  praising  the  absent, 
or  praising  some  quality  or  mode  of  action, 
which  is  a  very  different  sort  of  praise  indeed. 
When  and  where  it  is  prudent  to  praise  a 
man  to  his  face,  how  we  should  go  about  it, 
and  with  whom,  and  under  what  conditions, 
and  whether  it  is  likely  to  do  the  one  we 
praise  more  good  or  harm,  these  are  all  ques- 
tions that  for  the  present  we  leave  to  each 
one's  own  wit  and  prudence  to  answer,  for 
72 


Christ  Speaking  to  the  People 


The  Power  of  Praise 

the  subject  does  not  concern  us  here.  It  is 
about  the  second  sort  of  praise  that  we  mean 
to  think  and  argue  at  this  present  writing, — 
to  wit,  the  praise  we  give  to  absent  persons, 
or  to  modes  of  action,  or  to  virtues  and 
achievements,  and  the  influence  which  that 
praise  has  upon  ourselves  and  upon  our 
fellow-men. 

It  is  clear  that  we  are  all  concerned  with 
the  practical  issues  of  this  discussion.  Are 
we  not  all  of  us  perpetually  at  it,  praising  or 
dispraising  men,  women  and  things,  during 
most  of  our  waking  hours?  Scarcely  a  topic 
enters  into  our  speech,  but  our  personal 
attitude  of  praise  or  blame  towards  it,  o-f 
commendation  or  disapproval  slips  from  us 
unawares.  Even  though  we  had  as  lief  keep 
our  personal  attitude  in  the  dark  of  our  own 
minds,  it  will  not  stay  hid,  but  slips  between 
our  lips,  or  sparkles  from  our  eyes,  or  peeps 
from  the  very  wrinkles  and  publishes  itself 
abroad  whether  we  will  or  no.  If,  then,  our 
praise  and  our  dispraise  have  any  influence 
on  other  men,  we  must  do  a  great  deal  of 
good  or  a  great  deal  of  harm  with  it,  as  we 
go  on  about  our  business,  through  our  long 
lives  in  this  watchful  and  listening  world ! 

That  our  praise,  our  commendation  an</ 
73 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

approval  of  other  persons  and  of  their  acts 
and  virtues,  does  have  an  influence  both  on 
ourselves  and  on  other  men,  who  can  doubt 
for  a  moment?  Praise  and  its  opposite, 
blame,  have  a  tremendous  moral  power  in 
forming  ideals  and  attitudes  and  opinions 
and  points  of  view.  All  of  us,  whether  we 
like  it  or  no,  are  moved  by  other  men's 
authority,  and  depend  on  their  judgment  and 
lean  upon  their  estimate  of  the  value  of 
things.  What  they  praise,  we  are  apt  to 
esteem  more  highly ;  what  they  blame,  is 
lessened  in  our  sight.  If  they  are  contempt- 
uous or  indifferent,  we  are  very  likely  to  be 
inclined  to  contempt  or  indifference  too. 

As  other  men  move  us  by  their  expressions 
of  blame  or  praise,  so  do  we  in  our  turn 
influence  and  sway  the  thoughts  of  other 
men.  We  cannot  express  our  admiration  of 
a  person  or  a  thing,  but  they  are  uncon- 
sciously inclined  to  value  it  more  highly;  if 
we  depreciate  or  blame,  we  set  their  minds 
to  censuring  or  fault-finding  too. 

We  may  perhaps  here  object  to  ourselves 
that  we  are  quite  too  insignificant  and  of  too 
slight  importance  for  our  praise  or  blame  to 
have  all  the  weight  with  men  that  has  been 
just  described.  But  our  importance,  or  want 
74 


The  Power  of  Praise 

of  it,  merely  changes  the  reach  and  power  of 
our  praise.  That  we  are  obscure  does  not 
take  away  our  influence,  it  merely  confines  it 
to  a  narrower  circle.  Within  that  circle, 
where  we  are  known  and  loved,  our  praise 
or  blame  has  still  its  own  moral  power, 
inevitable  and  strong. 

We  may  convince  ourselves  of  this  very 
easily  by  taking  the  extreme  example  of  a 
little  child.  Who  could  be  more  insignificant, 
of  less  authority  and  importance,  than  yonder 
little  one  of  six  or  seven  years?  His  elders 
listen  to  his  prattled  praise  or  blame  with  an 
amused  indulgence  that  does  not  take  account 
at  all  of  his  wee  judgment  in  fixing  the  values 
of  things.  But  see  him  among  his  little  play- 
fellows— his  praise  or  blame  is  very  weighty 
there!  If  he  likes  a  toy  or  a  game,  if  he 
dislikes  a  teacher,  or  thinks  a  lesson  dull  and 
hard,  he  can  mightily  affect  the  public  senti- 
ment of  the  tiny  republic  of  his  equals  which 
hears  his  puny  voice.  So  it  is  with  us  grown- 
up children,  in  our  way.  Each  one  of  us  ha- 
likewise  his  certain  circle,  be  it  great  or  small, 
which  listens  with  ready  sympathy  to  his 
praise  or  blame,  and  moulds  unconsciously 
its  estimates  upon  his  own. 

Is  it  not  clear,  then,  how  easily  we  may 
75 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

make  our  praise  and  our  blame  subserve  the 
end  of  helping  other  men?  To  put  it  simply, 
the  principle  is  this :  What  we  praise,  if  we 
have  influence  with  others,  they  will  like  and 
admire  and  desire  to  have  some  part  in ;  and 
what  we  blame,  or  criticise,  or  condemn,  will 
be  cheapened  and  lessened  in  their  eyes. 

See  what  a  power  this  gives  us,  and  what 
a  responsibility!  Our  casual  remarks,  our 
praises  and  criticisms  thrown  off  a  hundred 
times  a  day,  in  chance  encounters  or  occa- 
sional conversations,  have  all  our  lives  been 
moulding,  altering,  deepening  the  ideals  and 
convictions  of  our  fellow-men.  Have  we 
shown  our  esteem  of  heavenly  and  godly 
ways  of  living?  Our  hearers  are  the  better 
for  it.  Did  we  base  our  praise  or  blame  on 
mere  worldly  or  human  standards  of  value? 
We  have  done  our  part  to  lower  their  stand- 
ards, their  ideals,  to  our  own.  Hence  it  is, 
mark  you,  that  close  friends  come  in  time  to 
have  common  ways  of  judging,  valuing  and 
esteeming  those  things  of  which  they  speak 
to  one  another  in  praise  or  blame.  Hence, 
too,  the  fearful  power  of  that  bloody  tyrant 
called  "Human  Respect,"  which  is  nothing 
else  indeed  than  our  respect  for  and  fear  of 
the  chorus  of  human  praise  or  blame. 
76 


The  Power  of  Praise 

Perhaps  this  power  of  praise  or  of  blame, 
its  influence  to  mould  and  form  ideals  and 
set  desires  afire,  is  nowhere  greater  than  with 
the  little  ones.  Children  are  mightily  moved, 
beyond  what  most  of  us  dream,  by  what  they 
hear  their  elders  praising  or  blaming.  They 
have  a  marvelous  power,  almost  an  intuition, 
for  catching  the  opinions  and  standards  of 
the  "grown-ups"  and  for  weaving  them  into 
their  baby  dreams  and  play.  Preach  to  them 
as  you  will  of  being  good  and  honest  and 
sincere  and  pious,  if  they  catch  from  your 
daily  praise  and  blame  that  you  really  esteem 
other  qualities  far  more  than  these,  that  you 
esteem  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Wealthy,  who  are  fash- 
ionable people,  far  more  than  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Poor,  who  are  simple,  pious  folk;  that  you 
think  much  more  highly  of  Miss  Evelyn 
Dress,  who  is  socially  exclusive,  than  of  Miss 
Anna  Plain,  who  is  full  of  charitable  works 
and  does  a  great  deal  for  the  poor,  do  you 
think  your  abstract  sermons  and  advice  will 
hold  out  any  bait  to  their  youthful  fancies? 
Will  they  be  dreaming  of  growing  up  to  be 
"good"  and  "pious"  and  "dutiful,"  or  will 
they  be  yearning  to  grow  worthy  in  time  of 
such  admiring  words  as  they  hear  Papa  and 
Mamma  give  to  Mrs.  Wealthy  and  to  Evelyn 
77 


^  Neighbor  and  You 

Dress?  Oh,  how  long  we  remember,  and 
how  steadily  we  pursue  the  things  we  heard 
praised  and  commended  when  no  one  thought 
we  were  by,  the  praises  which  we  drank  in, 
unsuspecting  and  unsuspected,  with  all  the 
thirst  and  fervor  of  our  childish  hearts ! 

And  now,  how  shall  we  turn  this  great 
moral  power  to  subserve  the  purposes  of  an 
apostleship?  First  of  all,  by  making  our 
own  hearts  firm  and  true  and  sound  as  to 
what  we  should  blame  and  what  we  should 
praise.  For  the  world  at  large,  this  would 
be  a  desperate  counsel  and  a  disheartening 
beginning, — how  should  the  unbeliever  know 
what  justly  to  praise  or  blame?  It  is  too 
often  all  one  to  him, — truth  and  falsehood, 
good  or  evil.  What  he  likes  or  dislikes  must 
be  the  present  standard  of  his  praise  or 
blame;  indeed,  vague  as  his  convictions  are, 
he  should  dare  scarcely  blame  at  all. 

But  the  Catholic  is  saved  this  vagueness 
and  confusion  as  to  the  standards  of  good 
and  evil;  his  opinion  and  attitude  on  a  whole 
range  of  subjects,  on  the  deepest  issues  of 
life,  are  settled  forever  by  the  one  fact  of 
his  whole-hearted  allegiance  to  the  Church. 
As  a  loyal  Catholic,  there  is  but  one  attitude 
for  him,  and  he  has  only  to  be  well-instructed, 
78 


The  Power  of  Praise 

consistent,  and  sturdy  in  his  Catholic  prin- 
ciples to  praise  well  and  blame  well  on  the 
weightiest  subjects  that  can  arise. 

Let  us  then  dare  and  bear  to  shape  our 
praise  and  blame,  all  our  candid  estimates  of 
men  and  things,  upon  the  solid  and  consistent 
ground  of  Catholic  principle.  Let  us  dare  to 
do  it;  for  however  convinced  we  may  be  of 
the  truth  and  soundness  of  our  Catholic  Faith, 
we  shall  often  be  sorely  tempted  to  forsake 
those  true  and  unpopular  standards,  and  to 
conform  to  the  false  but  popular  standards  of 
the  world.  How  sad  it  is — how  queer  it 
must  seem,  even  to  the  non-believer,  when  he 
reflects  upon  it — that  a  Catholic  should  judge 
of  and  estimate  men  and  things  by  the  mere 
worldly  values  of  time  and  of  this  life,  when 
by  his  profession  of  Catholicity  he  should 
weigh  them  by  the  standards  of  Heaven  and 
of  eternity!  What  a  huge  incongruity:  to 
profess  the  doctrine  of  the  Crucified,  who 
came  to  overcome  the  world,  and  yet  forever 
to  have  upon  one's  lips  worldly  maxims, 
worldly  estimates,  lauds  of  money -getting 
for  its  own  sake,  talk  of  pleasure-having  for 
its  own  sake,  nay,  even  praise  of  prosperous 
scoundrels,  of  skilful  evil-doers  who  are  the 
evry  foes  and  executioners  of  the  Crucified! 
79 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Then,  too,  we  must  bear  to  praise  and 
blame  according  to  our  Catholic  faith  and 
principles.  And  this  means  a  distinct  and 
long-continued  struggle  against  our  own  evil 
leanings  towards  the  falsely-seeming  good 
things,  the  standards  and  desires  of  the  flesh 
and  of  the  world.  To  praise  and  blame  dis- 
creetly we  must  go  counter  to  our  own  lower 
inclinations.  To  estimate  and  approve  all 
things  according  to  the  value  they  have  in 
God's  eyes,  this  is  to  go  squarely  against  all 
that  is  ungodly  in  us,  to  conquer  our  own 
baser  selves  which  yearn  and  crave  to  praise 
the  good  things  of  this  world. 

Yet  this  only  points  to  another  good  which 
comes  of  the  apostleship  of  worthy  praise. 
For  it  is  a  blessed  thing  for  us  to  put  the 
world's  standards  by,  and  look  up  manfully 
towards  the  eternal  truths.  If  we  could  but 
grow  accustomed  to  looking  up  at  them  and 
framing  our  ideas  by  them,  how  much  more 
consistent,  and  sensible,  and  Christian  our 
thoughts  and  our  actions  would  come  to  be! 
We  would  not  then  be  dwelling  on  money 
and  fashion,  on  clothes  or  goods  or  business 
or  pleasure  or  barter  or  trade,  as  though 
these  were  man's  last  end  and  aim ! 

If  we  praise  well,  we  shall  come  by  degrees 
80 


The  Power  of  Praise 

to  love  well,  and  then  to  act  well.  For  what 
we  praise  we  grow  to  love,  and  we  act  by 
what  we  love.  So  that  if  we  would  set  our- 
selves manfully  to  praise  honesty  and  honor, 
unselfish  and  lofty  ways  of  living,  faith, 
charity,  gentleness,  obedience,  and  holy  deeds, 
and  all  the  natural  and  supernatural  virtues, 
we  should  come  in  time  to  love,  and  then  to 
be  these  things.  If  we  praised  men  because 
they  are  staunch  Catholics,  because  they  bring 
up  their  children  carefully  in  God's  fear  and 
love,  because  they  are  of  sterling  principle, 
and  faithful  in  their  way  of  life,  we  should, 
if  we  were  sincere,  soon  come  to  be  so  too. 

There  is  another  advantage  in  this  same 
practice  of  worthy  praise,  to  wit,  that  by 
commending  noble,  Catholic  and  honorable 
ways  of  living,  we  in  some  way  commit  our- 
selves to  attempt  them  ourselves.  For  every 
man  likes  to  appear,  and  to  be,  consistent.  If 
we  have  the  courage  to  praise  what  is  worthy 
we  gain  heart  to  attempt  to  do  it.  If  we  rind 
ourselves  keeping  company  with  high  ideals, 
we  shall  begin  to  itch  a  bit  to  put  them  into 
action.  If  we  have  the  good  sense  to  speak 
consistently  with  our  Catholic  faith  and  prin- 
ciple, we  shall  grow  more  ashamed  of  going 
counter  to  them  in  our  deeds. 
81 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

There  are  one  or  two  practical  applications 
of  the  truths  we  have  been  dwelling  on  which 
it  would  be  too  bad  to  leave  unnoticed.  One 
of  these  has  to  do  with  the  way  Catholics 
speak  of  other  Catholics,  or  of  Catholic 
enterprises  and  Societies,  or  of  Catholic 
ecclesiastics  and  the  rulers  of  the  Church. 
It  is  a  sad  thing  to  say,  but  a  spirit  is  abroad 
now-a-days  to  speak  rather  disparagingly  of 
things  Catholic,  merely  from  a  desire,  it  may 
be,  of  standing  well  with  the  world,  or  of 
showing  our  own  broad-mindedness ;  or  per- 
haps, of  giving  other  folks  an  idea  that  we 
are  rather  above  the  common  run  of  the 
faithful,  and  not  to  be  classed  with  the  poor, 
ordinary  Catholics  one  sees  in  such  numbers 
in  church! 

Leaving  aside  the  many  reasons  drawn 
from  loyalty  and  reverence  and  charity  and 
consistency  and  good  feeling,  which  rise  up 
to  condemn  this  unworthy  attitude  of  mind, 
how  unwise  and  injurious  it  is  when  we  look 
at  it  from  the  viewpoint  of  its  effect  on  the 
non-Catholics  around  us !  They  expect  that 
we,  who  pledge  our  whole  faith  and  stake 
all  our  hopes  of  life  eternal  on  the  truth,  the 
nobleness  and  the  heavenly  beauty  of  Catholic 
teaching,  should  be  filled  with  reverence  and 
82 


The  Power  of  Praise 

esteem  for  all  that  belongs  to  or  is  associated 
with  our  holy  faith.  They  realize  that  we 
are  the  natural  defenders  and  advocates  of 
all  things  Catholic.  How  shocked  and  dis- 
illusioned and  repelled  they  must  be  to  find 
us  speaking  in  a  depreciating  way  of  our 
brothers  in  the  cause  of  Christ,  of  our 
pastors,  who  bear  His  authority,  of  the 
persons  and  things  which  are  most  intimately 
associated  with  His  Church,  His  spiritual 
Kingdom  in  this  world! 

How  sternly  we  should  crush  out  in  our- 
selves this  mean  and  carping  spirit;  how 
steadily  we  should  urge  ourselves  to  lean 
towards  praise  and  encouragement  whenever 
there  is  question  of  Catholics  or  of  Catholic 
enterprise!  No  need  of  false  praise,  nor  of 
fulsome  adulation ;  for  these  things  are  never 
helpful  nor  good.  If  we  have  clear  eyes  and 
an  unenvious  heart,  we  shall  always  find 
enough  and  to  spare  in  the  Catholic  world 
about  us,  to  furnish  us  many  an  occasion 
for  hearty  and  merited  commendation. 

Again,  a  failing  of  ours  which  must  often 
hurt  and  scandalize  the  well-disposed  non- 
Catholic  is  that  queer  tendency  we  have  to 
set  up  as  representative  Catholics  men  who 
are  poor  types  indeed  of  what  the  Church 
83 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

desires  in  her  sons.  Because  a  man  owns  to 
the  name  of  Catholic,  and  has  besides  won 
place  and  esteem  in  the  world,  by  his  pro- 
fession, it  may  be,  or  his  fortune  or  his  wits, 
we  are  often  all  too  ready  to  trumpet  him 
abroad  as  a  great  Catholic  citizen  and  point 
to  him  with  pride  as  a  bright  example  of  his 
kind.  What  must  the  non-believer  think, 
once  more,  when  he  knows  quite  well  that 
this  man's  whole  claim  to  distinction  and 
esteem  rests  upon  his  possession  of  the  good 
things  of  this  world ;  that  he  is  only  good 
and  great,  if  so  at  all,  from  a  worldly  stand- 
point, and  that  if  he  be  viewed  from  a  sound 
Catholic  viewpoint  and  weighed  in  the 
balance  of  Catholic  principle,  he  is  one  of 
the  least  worthy  and  estimable  of  the  Church's 
sons?  "And  this  is  the  manner  of  man,"  the 
non-Catholic  will  say  to  himself,  "whom 
these  Catholics  set  up  as  their  representa- 
tive, their  boast  and  their  pride!  God  save 
the  mark!  They  are  the  most  inconsistent 
people  on  earth.  They  praise  unworldliness, 
and  honor  this  shameless  worldling;  they 
speak  of  piety,  and  extol  this  notorious 
neglecter  of  his  religious  duties;  they  prate 
of  honesty  and  sober  living,  and  then  join 
hands  with  this  successful  rogue!  I  will 
84 


The  Power  of  Praise 

have  none  of  them ;  they  cannot  believe  the 
noble  things  they  say !"  Let  us  be  careful, 
very  circumspect  and  careful,  about  whom, 
or  what  we  set  aloft  as  representative  of  our 
Catholic  principles!  We  are  watched,  and 
we  are  judged  by  a  keen-sighted,  shrewdly- 
suspicious  and  not  over-friendly  world ! 

We  have  reached  the  limits  we  had  set 
ourselves,  and  have  scarcely  yet  broken  the 
surface  of  this  vast  subject  of  the  power  of 
praise.  But  what  we  have  said  will  have 
fulfilled  its  purpose  if  it  serves  only  to  make 
us  realize  how  great  and  how  far-reaching  is 
the  influence  which  our  blame  or  our  com- 
mendation wields  on  the  minds  of  other  men. 

We  walk  through  the  world,  quite  carelessly 
it  may  be,  speaking  out  our  minds,  proclaiming 
our  opinions,  giving  forth  our  standards, 
little  conscious  all  the  while  of  how  much 
our  light  words  may  mean  in  the  ears  of  our 
fellows.  Those  words  we  utter — the  praise, 
the  criticism,  the  censure  and  the  blame — go 
abroad  into  other  minds  and  hearts,  and  are 
caught  up  and  repeated  and  multiplied  like 
ripples  in  still  water,  until  the  thoughts  of  a 
whole  multitude  of  men  and  women  and 
children  are  wrought  upon,  their  standards 
raised  or  lowered,  their  emulation  and  their 
85 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

desire  stirred  up  and  fired  for  weal  or  woe. 
How  far  each  easy,  careless  speech  of  ours 
has  been  borne  abroad  and  swayed  men's 
minds  and  fortunes,  who  but  God  can  tell? 
Such  a  mighty  power  for  good  or  for  evil  lies 
hid  in  the  tiny  organ  we  call  our  tongue ! 


86 


OUR  TALK  IN  BUSINESS 

'E  sometimes  say  that  professional 
men  are  liable  to  grow  abstracted 
and  over-engrossed  in  their  own  especial  line. 
If  we  observe  a  bit  more  closely,  I  think  we 
shall  find  that  it  is  the  man  of  business  who 
becomes  most  deeply  wrapped  up  in  the 
affairs  of  his  traffic  and  his  gain.  Listen  to 
the  talk  on  the  street  cars  some  fine  morning 
when  men's  tongues  are  loosened  by  the 
weather  or  the  time  of  year,  and  see  for 
yourself  what  makes  the  chief  matter  of  their 
casual  talk. 

The  professional  man  will  speak  of  many 
things  quite  foreign  to  his  specialty,  of  cur- 
rent happenings  in  this  or  other  lands,  of  the 
last  book,  or  the  latest  rumor  of  war.  But 
the  business  man,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten, 
is  rattling  on  either  about  politics,  which  is 
a  sort  of  secondary  business  with  him,  or 
about  his  beloved  trade.  What  he  has  bought 
or  sold  or  is  just  about  buying  or  selling,  the 
profits  he  has  made  or  is  expecting,  the 
chances  of  markets,  the  changes  in  supply 
and  demand — you  may  hear  all  these  things 
discussed  to  no  end  with  the  greatest  gusto, 
87 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

with  never  a  word  of  any  alien  topic  what- 
soever thrown  in  on  either  side  to  relieve  the 
monotony  of  the  talk  of  shop. 

This  perpetual  abstraction  and  absorp- 
tion in  matters  of  dollars  and  cents 
is,  to  put  it  mildly,  no  very  ennobling 
thing  for  the  mind  and  heart.  A  man 
must  live,  to  be  sure,  and  he  must  have 
money  to  live;  but  to  be  forever  busy  with 
thoughts  of  money  is  not  very  much  more 
elevating  than  to  be  always  busy  with 
thoughts  of  food.  Even  from  the  low  stand- 
point of  one's  own  mental  saneness  and 
efficiency  then,  it  would  be  a  very  useful  thing 
to  make  some  practical  reflections  on  the  sub- 
ject of  the  Apostleship  of  Speech  in  Business 
Life. 

However,  there  are  other  motives  for 
dwelling  on  the  subject,  which  are  more 
weighty  than  this.  To  begin  with,  it  is  some- 
times rather  pointedly  questioned  nowadays 
whether  our  Catholic  business  men  are  the 
mighty  instruments  for  spreading  their  holy 
faith  that  one  might  expect  them  to  be  from 
their  numbers  and  their  general  influence. 
When  our  Lord  said  that  His  followers 
should  be  the  salt  of  the  earth  and  the  light 
of  the  world,  He  did  not  mean,  of  course, 
88 


Our  Talk  in  Business 

that  we  were  all  to  preach  His  gospel  from 
the  house-tops,  but  it  is  quite  certain  that 
He  did  mean  that  every  one  was  to  do  his 
share  in  spreading  the  good  tidings  among 
men.  Suppose  that  a  Catholic  spends  ten, 
twenty  or  fifty  years  of  his  life  in  the  closest 
kind  of  daily  and  hourly  contact  with  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men,  and  that  at  the  end 
of  that  long  time  of  constant  opportunity 
he  cannot  point  to  any  deliberate  or  consistent 
work  for  the  spreading  abroad  of  the  truth 
of  Christ,  can  that  man  by  any  stretching  of 
the  meaning  of  words  be  properly  said  to 
have  discharged  his  Christian  duty  of  being 
the  salt  of  the  earth  and  the  light  of  the 
world  ? 

At  this  point  of  our  reflections  I  seem  to 
hear  some  hard-headed  man  of  business  break 
in  upon  me  with  an  emphatic  objection: 
"Any  one  who  would  speak  of  business  life 
as  a  time  of  constant  opportunity  for  spread- 
ing Catholic  truth  cannot  be  very  familiar 
with  what  he  is  talking  about.  Why,  a 
business  man  would  laugh  at  you  if  you  were 
to  begin  that  sort  of  thing.  An  office  or  a 
store  is  the  last  place  on  earth  to  do  any 
missionary  work  in  the  way  of  spreading 
Catholic  doctrine.  The  Apostleship  of  Speech 
89 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

is  all  very  well  at  home,  in  social  life,  or  even 
in  professional  life,  if  you  will,  but  it  is  out 
of  place  altogether  in  the  busy  and  distracted 
day  of  the  average  business  man." 

Let  us  go  over  the  ground  a  bit  together, 
my  dear  objector,  and  see  whether  all  oppor- 
tunities are  wanting  even  in  the  busy  haunts 
of  trade.  First  of  all,  there  is  the  negative 
side  of  the  picture  to  be  looked  at,  for  we 
accomplish  nearly  as  much  good  at  times  by 
the  things  we  refrain  from  as  by  the  things 
we  do.  Whether  he  likes  it  or  not,  the  man 
who  professes  to  be  a  Catholic  is  always 
under  scrutiny.  Men  differ  in  many  things, 
but  for  the  most  part  they  agree  in  this,  that 
they  despise  a  hypocrite  and  resent  a  man's 
making  profession  of  a  high  and  holy  creed, 
and  then  acting  and  speaking  no  better  than 
the  common  run.  And  so  they  keep  a  sharper 
watch  on  Catholics  (who,  as  they  know  per- 
fectly well,  profess  the  hardest  and  loftiest 
religion  in  the  world)  to  see  if  they  make  at 
least  some  decent  effort  to  live  up  to  their 
exalted  principles.  This  thought  opens  up  to 
us  at  once  a  rich  and  varied  field  for  reflec- 
tion, which,  of  course,  we  shall  only  have 
time  to  travel  over  very  briefly. 

It  goes  without  saying,  to  begin  with,  that 

yo 


Our  Talk  in  Business 

a  Catholic  man's  speech  should  be  utterly  pure 
from  any  taint  of  that  monstrous  abuse  of 
man's  faculty  of  speech  which  we  call  profan- 
ity. To  hear  even  a  pagan  making  free  with 
the  holiest  words  in  our  language,  to  lend  a 
little  emphasis  to  his  worthless  remarks,  is 
dreadful  enough,  even  though  we  may  offer  for 
him  the  sorry  excuse  that  he  does  not  realize 
the  evil  thing  he  is  doing.  But  to  hear  a 
Catholic  employing  in  light  and  ribald  jest 
the  sacred  names  he  learned  to  reverence  at 
his  mother's  knee  is  melancholy  and  shame- 
ful in  the  extreme. 

There  are,  however,  more  subtle  and 
insidious  ways  than  this  of  giving  scandal  in 
our  talk,  which  the  Apostleship  of  Speech 
will  make  an  earnest  Catholic  avoid.  One 
of  these,  and  that  by  no  means  the  least 
dangerous  and  harmful,  is  the  way  we  are 
liable  to  fall  into  of  making  free  with  another 
man's  good  name.  In  this  age  of  unlicensed 
speech  many  folk  seem  almost  to  have  lost 
the  sense  of  right  and  wrong  in  dealing  with 
their  neighbor's  reputation.  They  speak 
quite  freely  of  his  faults  and  failings,  they 
even  publish  his  hidden  sins.  Nothing  is 
more  easy  to  acquire  than  this  fatal  habit  of 
making  free  with  other  people's  good  name, 
91 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

but  how  little  most  men  realize  the  sinister 
consequences  of  their  fluent  slander !  How 
little  they  think  of  the  reparation  they  are 
bound  to  make  for  the  good  repute  they 
have  unjustly  stolen,  and  for  the  scandal  they 
have  given  by  their  loose  and  libelous  speech. 

The  average  half  pagan  or  whole  pagan  of 
the  day  may  again  offer  in  excuse  of  this 
evil  habit  of  calumny  and  slander  the  slim 
defense  that  the  evil  of  his  ways  has  not  been 
pointed  out  to  him  with  all  the  clearness  and 
force  of  Christ's  divine  teaching,  but  only  in 
the  vaguer  warnings  of  the  natural  law.  But 
how  can  we  Catholics  justify  ourselves — 
who  have  heard  from  the  incarnate  God 
Himself  such  words  as  these:  "Thou  shalt 
not  bear  false  witness" ;  "Judge  not  lest  ye 
be  judged" ;  "If  ye  did  it  to  the  least  of  these, 
My  brethren,  you  did  it  unto  Me"? 

Yet  in  the  off-hand  familiarity  of  the  office 
or  the  store  we  may  find  many  an  occasion 
to  fall  into  this  abominable  habit  of  unchar- 
itable talk.  We  are  abstracted,  worried,  or 
tired,  and  our  mind  and  our  tongue  both 
crave  a  bit  of  ready,  interesting  speech. 
Nothing  easier  in  the  world  than  to  talk  of 
persons  whom  we  know !  Nothing  nearer, 
alas,  to  our  poor  lips  than  a  morsel  of 
92 


Our  Talk  in  Business 

acrimonious  criticism,  or  an  unsavory  rumor 
about  some  one  of  our  acquaintance !  So 
we  say  the  word  or  two  to  our  neighbor, 
and  he  or  she  takes  up  the  strain,  and 
perhaps  even  the  topic  becomes  general,  as 
each  one  adds  a  bit  of  fretful  or  unkind 
comment  of  his  own.  Then  we  go  back  to 
work,  feeling  refreshed,  it  may  be,  at  having 
got  rid  of  so  much  rancor;  but  we  little 
realize  the  evil  we  have  done.  The  chances 
are  that  in  those  few  moinents  we  have  done 
our  neighbor  a  serious,  maybe  an  irreparable 
wrong.  We  have  planted  the  fruitful  seeds 
of  aversion  and  suspicion  in  our  hearers' 
hearts.  The  memory  of  our  words  and  even 
of  the  occasion  that  called  them  forth  may 
die  away  from  their  minds.  The  very  manner 
of  our  disparaging  and  calumnious  speech 
may  vanish  from  their  thoughts.  But  when 
hereafter  the  name  of  the  person  we  spoke 
ill  of  comes  to  their  ears,  the  lingering 
prejudice  born  of  our  unkind  talk  will  rise 
up,  and  they  will  dislike  and  distrust  him. 
Now,  what  is  the  keen,  observant  man  of 
business  likely  to  think  of  men  who  profess 
a  creed  of  the  tenderest  charity  and  good  will 
towards  all  of  God's  children  and  yet  soil 
their  lips  with  these  vile  calumnies? 
93 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Another  sort  of  talk  which  the  Catholic 
man  or  woman  in  business  should  be  solicitous 
to  avoid  is  what  one  might  call  for  short  a 
sort  of  lip-worship  of  Mammon.  To  hear 
some  business  men  of  the  day,  one  would 
think  that  the  sole  person  to  be  admired  is 
the  successful  money-getter,  and  that  the 
last  end  of  mankind  is  to  gather  worldly 
gear.  They  speak  of  wealthy  men  with 
bated  breath,  they  praise  the  wiles  of  the 
unscrupulous  financier  with  an  approving  and 
an  envying  air;  you  gather  from  their 
ordinary  talk  that  in  their  eyes  the  happy 
man  is  he  who  can  keep  his  stealings  well 
beyond  the  purview  of  the  law.  Even  these 
worshipers  of  sharp  dealing  will  hardly  be 
much  edified,  I  think,  to  find  the  Catholic 
men  and  women  of  their  acquaintance  joining 
in  their  loose  views  of  the  seventh  command- 
ment. They  know  well  enough  that  in  our 
system  of  belief  goods  and  gr>ld  are  only  a 
means  towards  the  heavenly  and  everlasting 
kingdom,  and  not  an  end  to  be  pursued  at 
the  cost  of  body  and  soul.  They  know,  too, 
quite  well  that  a  Catholic  is  bound  to  repent, 
and  to  give  back  his  ill-gotten  gains  before 
he  can  validly  receive  the  Sacrament  of 
Penance.  What  must  they  think,  then,  when 
94 


Our  Talk  in  Business 

they  hear  us  speak  the  same  loose  and  worldly 
language  with  themselves? 

Another  fault  which  we  should  dwell  on  a 
bit  (though  our  catalogue  is  rather  long 
already)  is  the  way,  alas  too  common,  in 
which  some  Catholics  speak  of  persons  and 
of  things  pertaining  to  their  Church  and  their 
Faith.  Here,  again,  we  must  try  to  realize 
the  marked  difference  between  ourselves  and 
the  followers  of  all  other  creeds.  In  other 
creeds  it  has  come  at  last  to  this,  that  men 
look  upon  their  ministers  as  pretty  much  on 
the  same  plane  as  themselves,  appointed  by 
merely  human  authority  and  governing  and 
teaching  with  that  influence  only  which  each 
one's  talents  and  good  qualities  can  claim. 
Every  one  knows  quite  well  that  here,  as  in 
so  many  other  points,  the  Catholic  belief  is 
altogether  different.  We  profess  that,  how- 
ever humble  the  talents  of  our  priests  may 
be,  and  whatever  their  personal  character,  we 
are  bound  to  see  in  each  of  them  the  ambassa- 
dor and  vicegerent  of  God,  who  has  put  them 
where  they  are.  Any  insult  we  offer  to  them 
in  their  priestly  office  is  offered  to  the  very 
dignity  and  holiness  with  which  they  have 
been  endowed  by  God.  How  strangely 
inconsistent,  then,  it  must  seem  to  those 
95 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

without  the  fold  to  hear  us  discussing  and 
criticizing  our  pastors ! 

Even  though  we  were  to  do  or  say  nothing 
positive  and  definite  upon  the  subject  of  our 
Catholic  faith,  but  were  to  content  ourselves 
with  avoiding  the  evils  and  abuses  we  have 
been  pointing  out,  we  should  have  accom- 
plished a  great  deal  in  the  way  of  a  true 
apostleship.  For  the  world  at  large,  used 
as  it  is  to  hear  all  manner  of  slander  and 
criticism  and  the  common  malice  and 
uncharitableness,  which  make  up  so  much  of 
the  speech  of  men,  will  be  struck  with 
wonder  at  the  spectacle  of  a  man  or  woman 
whose  talk  is  quite  innocent  of  all  offense, 
and  will  be  moved  by  that  rare  and  singular 
effect  to  esteem  and  inquire  into  our  faith, 
which  is  the  motive  of  so  much  self-restraint 
and  careful  reverence  for  the  laws  of  God. 
Thus,  even  though  we  should  seem  to  have 
but  little  time  or  opportunity  for  anything 
like  an  apostleship  during  the  full  days  of 
business,  here  is  at  least  one  way  in  which 
we  may  all  become  apostles,  by  never  doing 
or  saying  anything  unworthy  of  our  Catholic 
principles,  by  making  an  effort  to  attend  at 
least  to  the  negative  side  of  the  Apostleship 
of  Speech. 

96 


WEARING  A  CATHOLIC  FACE 

IN  our  last  paper  we  dwelt  in  some  detail 
upon  what  we  called  the  negative  side 
of  the  Apostleship  of  Speech  in  business: 
the  ways  in  which  one  may  aid  the  Church's 
cause  among  men,  by  keeping  oneself  clear 
of  certain  prevalent  and  common  sins  and 
abuses  of  speech.  There  remains  great 
matter  for  useful  observation  on  the  positive 
side  of  that  selfsame  subject,  to  which  we 
shall  address  ourselves  in  these  present  pages. 
In  the  previous  paper  we  put  ourselves  the 
question,  first  of  all,  whether  such  an  apostle- 
ship  has  any  place  in  the  hurry  and  flurry 
of  business  life,  and  as  the  speediest  and 
most  effective  way  of  answering  this  perti- 
nent inquiry,  let  us  plunge  at  once  into  a 
discussion  of  some  of  the  practical  ways  in 
which  ordinary  Catholic  men  or  women,  in 
shop  or  office  or  factory,  may  help  by  their 
daily  speech  to  spread  the  Kingdom  of  God 
on  earth. 

Our   first   suggestion    shall   be   a   practical 

and    momentous    one    of    wide    and    various 

application,  and  with  a  bearing  not  only  on 

this   present   matter   of  daily   speech    (which 

97 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

is,  after  all,  only  one,  though  perhaps  the 
chief  one,  of  our  ways  of  manifesting  our 
thoughts  and  character),  but  on  all  our 
dealings  with  our  fellow-men.  And  the 
suggestion  is  this:  "Let  us  begin  by  all  of 
us,  and  always,  putting  on  a  Catholic  face 
before  the  world !"  A  short  sentence  and 
easily  written — but  in  need  of  how  much 
qualifying  and  explanation ! 

What  do  we  mean  by  putting  on  a  Catholic 
face  before  the  world?  We  do  not  mean 
that  we  should  be  arrogant,  or  intolerant,  or 
pugnacious  about  being  Catholics ;  not  that 
we  should  throw  it  into  our  neighbor's  teeth, 
nor  drag  our  Catholicity  forth  at  unseasonable 
times,  to  be  a  rag  of  controversy,  or  a  prov- 
ocation to  our  non-Catholic  fellows ;  nor  even 
that  we  should  be  talking  of  our  Catholicity 
as  an  attribute  or  quality  of  ourselves,  as 
though  it  were  a  great  credit  to  us  that  we 
are  Catholics,  with  the  mild  and  obvious 
implication  to  all  dissenters  that  it  is  a  great 
shame  and  pity  to  them  that  they  are  not. 
All  these  ways  of  acting,  and  many  others 
which  savor  of  the  same  arrogance,  selfish- 
ness and  personal  vanity,  may,  by  some 
stretching  of  language,  be  called  putting  on 
a  "Catholic"  face — but  not  such  a  Catholic 


Wearing  a  Catholic  Face 

face  as  our  saying  recommends  us.  We 
mean  a  very  different  sort  of  face,  indeed. 
For  all  these  ways  of  acting  only  advertise 
the  selfish  and  partial  viewpoint  that  Cath- 
olicity belongs  to  us. 

The  attitude  we  mean  to  recommend  is 
quite  the  converse  one,  that  we,  heart,  mind, 
body  and  soul,  and  all  of  us,  belong  to 
Catholicity !  The  spirit  which  we  should  have 
is  quiet,  modest,  tactful  and  unintruding.  It 
is  as  gentle  as  it  is  fearless,  as  kind  and  per- 
suasive as  it  is  uncompromising,  where  there 
is  question  of  principle  or  truth.  The  man 
or  woman  who  puts  on  this  sort  of  a  Catholic 
face  goes  through  the  world  professing  his 
faith  in  every  daily  action,  because  he  or  she 
is  known  by  every  acquaintance  to  be  a  sturdy, 
prudent  and  staunch  believer  in  and  defender 
of  the  Holy  Catholic  Church. 

To  convey  this  impression,  and  to  let  every 
one  know  quite  plainly  that  we  are,  first  and 
foremost,  Catholics  in  heart  and  soul,  no  great 
parade  nor  forced  endeavor  is  required. 
What  is  necessary  is  a  deep  and  true  and 
unreserved  interior  loyalty  to  the  Church, 
and  to  her  doctrines  and  her  rulers,  and  a 
firm,  modest  and  consistent  way  of  acting 
along  the  lines  of  our  principles  and  our 
99 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

beliefs.  There  is  something  in  the  whole- 
some moral  atmosphere  which  a  true-hearted 
Catholic  bears  about  him,  which  has  a  solemn 
eloquence  to  proclaim  his  faith  to  his  fellow 
men.  And  the  business  man,  or  clerk,  or 
shop-girl,  or  factory-hand,  or  the  servant  in 
a  private  home  who  keeps  this  attitude  of 
quiet,  earnest  and  determined  Catholic  spirit 
and  principle  will  need  to  make  use  of  few 
formal  proclamations  to  announce  to  every 
one  with  whom  he  or  she  has  any  dealings 
that  here  is  a  practical  and  sincere  Catholic, 
prepared  and  determined  to  do  whatever  that 
great  and  holy  name  implies  and  requires. 

If  we  carry  into  our  daily  life  of  business 
such  a  Catholic  face,  such  a  Catholic  attitude 
and  bearing  of  body  and  soul  as  we  have 
outlined  here,  our  work  of  the  Apostleship 
of  Speech  will  be  half  accomplished  already. 
For,  as  we  have  noted  before,  one  speaks  by 
actions,  by  bearing,  character  and  manners, 
much  louder  and  more  eloquently  sometimes 
than  by  any  mere  noise  of  words.  And 
without  the  speech  of  action  the  speech  of 
words  is  mostly  vain  and  ineffective ;  for  as 
compared  with  the  latter,  as  all  men  realize, 
the  former  kind  of  speech  is  incomparably 
more  certain,  earnest  and  sincere. 
100 


Wearing  a  Catholic  Face 

There  are  some  further  consequences  of 
this  "wearing  a  Catholic  face"  in  our 
business  life  that  have  an  even  more  direct 
bearing  upon  our  present  subject,  and  hence 
invite  us  to  a  more  detailed  consideration. 
To  wear  such  a  character  before  the  world 
tends  to  make  earnest  men  come  to  us  of 
their  own  accord,  to  inquire  about  our  Holy 
Faith.  We  do  not  realize,  I  am  afraid,  those 
of  us  who  are  busied  all  day  long  with  the 
clatter  and  clink  of  dollars  and  cents  on  the 
dusty  counters  of  trade,  how  weary,  lonely 
and  starving  the  souls  of  many  even  of  our 
prosperous  and  well-fed  fellows  are  for  the 
bread  which  Christ  came  to  break  to  the 
children  of  men,  for  the  living  water  which 
He  alone  could  offer  to  the  parched  lips  of 
an  eager  and  thirsty  world. 

In  the  midst  of  their  material  success,  their 
lust  for  gain  and  their  eagerness  for  the 
ventures  and  excitements  of  business  life, 
most  men  have  vacant  moments  and  weary 
stretches  of  emptiness  and  longing.  Some- 
thing within  their  bosoms  tells  them  that  they 
were,  after  all,  not  made  only  for  the  present 
and  perishable  world.  Something  higher  and 
nobler  in  them  stirs  restlessly  and  craves  for 
the  Infinite  and  the  Eternal,  and  they  look 
101 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

.about  with  longing  and  uneasy  eyes  for  some 
guide,  some  hint,  some  token,  some  finger- 
post to  set  them  on  the  path  towards  God 
arid  Heaven.  They  yearn  for  some  clue  out 
of  their  labyrinth  of  temporal  affairs  into  the 
pure  air  of  God's  spiritual  dominion,  into  the 
kingdom  of  the  spirit,  which  somehow,  some- 
where, He  must  have  set  up  in  this  world. 
It  is  in  those  better  moments  that  there  shines 
forth  the  brightest  opportunity  to  save  and 
purify  and  strengthen  these  fellow  men  or 
women  of  yours  by  pointing  them  the  way 
into  that  Church  which  has  the  clue  to  all 
their  questions,  the  balm  for  all  their  restless 
ills  and  cares. 

If  their  wandering  eyes  do  not  see  any 
guide  out  of  their  empty  longings,  any 
deliverer  to  point  out  the  way  to  better  things, 
their  happy  hour  will  pass.  The  dust  and 
fog  of  earthly  concerns  will  close  once  more 
around  their  spirit,  the  Heaven-sent  longing 
fade  away,  and  all  their  energies  will  sink 
down  and  become  engrossed  once  more  in 
the  sordid  interests  of  this  present  life.  Cut 
if  they  have  seen  in  you  this  sterling  Catholic 
spirit  of  which  we  speak,  then  in  their 
moments  of  spiritual  longing  your  face  will 
rise  up  before  them  as  the  face  of  one  who 
102 


Wearing  a  Catholic  Face 

has  some  holy  clue  to  the  weary  riddles  of 
life,  they  will  come  to  you — timidly,  cau- 
tiously, it  may  be,  even  the  boldest  of  them 
throwing  out  delicate  hints,  giving  you  subtle 
invitations  to  aid  them  in  their  search  after 
light.  Sometimes  it  will  be  only  some  seem- 
ingly careless  question  they  will  have  to  ask 
you — sometimes  they  will  make  you  a  passion- 
ate appeal  to  tell  them  of  the  truth. 

Then,  if  you  are  a  true  Catholic,  a  true 
and  sterling  man  or  woman,  is  your  golden 
opportunity.  Then  you  may  use,  indeed,  to 
do  a  golden  deed,  the  holy  powers  of  the 
Apostleship  of  Speech.  Quietly,  prudently, 
tactfully,  speaking  humbly  and  earnestly  with 
the  eloquence  of  a  grateful  and  believing 
heart,  you  may  bear  witness,  as  the  Apostles 
did  of  old,  to  the  Faith  that  is  in  you.  You 
may  put  this  searching  soul  into  the  true  path 
of  salvation,  and  set  his  mind  and  heart  upon 
the  way  to  find  the  fulness  of  Catholic  truth. 

Does  all  this  sound  Utopian  and  visionary, 
too  strange  and  too  delightful  ever  to  be 
true?  But  it  has  happened,  time  and  time 
again,  thank  God,  here  in  our  own  country, 
even  among  our  poorest  toilers  in  the  great 
mill  or  the  busy  factory. 

"For  God's  sake,  tell  me  your  secret, 
103 


Vour  Neighbor  and  You 

Mary,"  cried  a  haggard-looking  girl  to  the 
Catholic  shoe-worker  who  stood  beside  her; 
"how  do  you  keep  so  good  among  us,  who 
are  some  of  us  so  dreadful  bad?  I'm  sick 
of  all  this  wicked  talk  myself.  Tell  me  your 
secret,  how  you  manage  to  keep  clean  of  it?" 

And  do  you  think  Alary  had  any  trouble 
then  in  pouring  forth  to  that  ready  listener 
her  simple  story  of  the  strength,  the  consola- 
tion and  support  she  found  in  her  Catholic 
Faith  ? 

It  was  a  somewhat  different  environment 
which  witnessed  a  similar  appeal  for  guid- 
ance and  direction.  Some  five  or  six  young 
business  men  had  come  together  at  a  club  to 
talk  over  plans  for  opening  a  new  subdivision 
of  residence  lots  in  one  of  our  great  cities. 
They  were  all  good  friends,  and  after  the 
somewhat  wearisome  details  of  shares  and 
prices  and  boundaries  had  been  decided,  they 
fell  to  friendly  talk  and  banter.  At  last  one 
of  them,  a  notoriously  loose  and  careless 
liver,  proposed  they  should  all  go  and  finish 
the  evening  at  a  resort  near  by.  The  others, 
laughing,  rose  as  if  to  comply,  but  one  of 
the  band  remained  seated  firmly  in  his  seat, 
his  forehead  knit  with  displeasure  and  deter- 
mination. The  others  left  the  room,  jesting 
104 


The  Miracle  at  Cana 


Wearing  a  Catholic  Face 

at  the  angry  brows ;  but  one,  a  clean-featured, 
honest-faced  fellow  of  thirty  or  so,  came 
quickly  back  and  sat  down  in  a  chair  facing 
the  knight  of  the  earnest  countenance. 

"Look  here,  Harry,"  said  he.  "Where  in 
thunder  do  you  get  your  nerve?  I've  seen 
you  do  that  sort  of  thing  before — stand  out 
like  a  rock  against  a  proposition  like  that, 
and  I'd  like  to  know  just  how  you  manage 
to  do  it.  I  believe  I've  got  as  much  character 
as  you  in  most  ordinary  things,  but  it  cer- 
tainly is  beyond  me  what  reserves  you  draw 
on  to  do  a  noble  turn  like  this." 

It  happened  that  Harry  was  telling  after- 
wards of  this  event  and  of  the  way  in  which 
he  had  astonished  himself  by  the  force  and 
aptness  of  his  explanations  about  the  Faith 
that  was  in  him. 

"Well,  do  you  know,"  said  he  in  conclu- 
sion, "I  had  him  thinking  fast.  When  I 
turned  off  the  tap  and  glanced  at  him  to  see 
how  he  was  taking  it,  he  looked  for  all  the 
world  as  if  he'd  been  seeing  visions, — he  was 
just  gasping  from  the  speed." 

Do  you  think,  dear  reader,  that  Harry  had 
any  great  difficulty  just  then  in  practising  the 
Apostleship  of  Speech? 

As  to  the  matter  of  our  Catholic  speech  to 
105 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

our  friends,  it  must  arise,  like  eloquence  in 
Daniel  Webster's  definition,  from  the  man, 
the  hearer,  and  the  occasion.  One's  tact  and 
sympathy  should  tell  him  or  her  how  far  to 
go,  what  to  say,  and  what  to  leave  unsaid. 
Surely  we  do  not  need  any  hard  and  fast 
rules  or  guide-posts  to  direct  us  in  speaking 
to  our  own  friends  of  the  subject  which 
should  be  nearest  and  dearest  to  our  hearts. 
Yet,  excellent  as  this  sounds  in  theory,  in 
practice  the  matter  is  by  no  means  so  smooth 
and  easy.  Two  things  will  help  us  on 
immensely, — knowledge  and  kindness.  To 
be  effective  apostles,  as  we  have  said  before, 
we  must  know  thoroughly  the  elements  of 
Catholic  belief,  and  the  Catholic  attitude  on 
questions  of  moment  of  the  day.  To  do  this 
we  must  read  Catholic  books  (and  what 
excellent  ones  are  coming  from  the  press 
nowadays!)  on  Catholic  subjects  and  Catholic 
views.  We  must  take  an  interest  in  Catholic 
periodicals,  we  must,  in  a  word,  steep  our 
thoughts  in  a  Catholic  atmosphere.  Then 
Catholic  truth  will  flow  easily  and  naturally 
from  our  lips. 

Secondly,    there    is    that    other    requisite: 
heartfelt    and     sympathetic    kindness.      The 
great  heart  of   the   world   is   really  sad   and 
106 


Wearing  a  Catholic  Face 

lonely.  The  hilariousness,  distraction  and 
pretence  of  our  modern  men  are  really  only 
a  frantic  effort  to  escape  from  a  great  inner 
hunger  and  loneliness.  To  reach  that  aching 
heart  and  minister  the  balm  of  truth  and 
consolation  one  must  have  recourse  to  gentle- 
ness, sympathy  and  kindness.  The  heart  of 
man,  to  use  a  fine  old  figure,  is  like  a  delicate 
flower — it  will  not  open  to  burly  blasts  and 
tempests  of  disputation ;  but  let  the  genial 
sun  and  the  soft  winds  of  friendliness  and 
kindness  shine  and  blow,  and  it  opens  wide 
to  drink  the  warmth  and  light,  and  gives 
forth  grateful  fragrance. 

If  we  but  fulfil  these  three  conditions  in 
our  own  person;  if  we  wear  a  Catholic  face 
before  the  world,  and  supply  our  minds  with 
the  riches  of  Catholic  thought  and  principle, 
and  fill  ourselves — our  whole  selves  this  time 
—with  true  charity,  tenderness  and  kindness, 
the  Apostleship  of  Speech  will  grow  easy  for 
us  indeed. 

"Hard  conditions!"  you  say.  So  are  all 
conditions  hard  that  lead  to  noble  enterprises. 
It  was  never  easy  to  win  souls  to  God.  Christ, 
our  Lord,  did  not  find  it  easy  to  walk,  foot- 
sore and  weary,  through  the  harsh  ways  of 
Israel,  repeating  an  unwelcome  message  in 
107 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

the  ears  of  an  unwilling  world.  Peter  and 
Paul,  and  all  the  holy  twelve,  did  not  find  it 
an  easy  task  to  range  over  rude  lands  and 
across  dangerous  seas  to  save  the  nations — 
given  over  to  all  lewdness,  frivolity  and 
crime.  The  countless  army  of  God's  min- 
isters do  not  find  it  easy  to  lead  laborious 
lives  in  the  midst  of  weariness  and  privation 
to  bring  men's  rebellious  necks  under  the 
meek  yoke  of  Christ. 

Do  you,  my  dear  Catholic  man  or  woman, 
cry  out  in  surprise  that  you  are  not  worthy 
to  be  spoken  of  along  with  these?  You 
must  endure  it.  To  you,  though  you  were 
the  lowliest,  the  simplest,  the  most  ignorant 
among  us,  were  spoken  also  those  stirring 
yet  warning  words  from  His  own  lips :  "You 
are  the  salt  of  the  earth ;  you  are  the  light  of 
the  world;  you  are  a  city  seated  on  a  moun- 
tain ;  let  your  light  shine  before  men" ;  and 
most  solemn,  momentous  and  significant  of 
all,  those  words  which  we  shall  all  of  us, 
great  and  small,  teachers  and  taught,  hear 
from  the  lips  of  the  Great  Judge  on  the  day 
of  the  Last  Judgment:  "Amen,  I  say  unto 
you,  as  long  as  you  did  it  unto  one  of  these, 
My  least  brethren,  you  did  it  unto  Me." 


108 


FOOLS'  GOLD 

SOMEWHERE  in  our  romantic  Colonial 
history  is  told  a  very  pitiful  story. 
One  of  those  crews  of  hardy  adventurers 
who  crossed  the  dangerous  ocean  to  tap  the 
riches  of  the  new  continent  came  upon  a 
river  whose  very  sands  were  gold.  There  it 
lay,  the  precious,  beautiful  stuff,  piled  up  in 
glistening  heaps,  all  ready  for  their  eager 
fingers,  and  they  fell  to  work  with  glee. 
They  gathered  sacks  ful  and  barrelsful, 
laughing  at  the  hardships  and  the  toil,  until 
their  vessels  were  loaded  down  with  the 
treasure.  Then  they  sailed  happily  home- 
ward over  the  perilous  sea.  And  when,  after 
many  a  storm  and  many  an  hour  of  wretched 
and  anxious  toil,  they  got  safely  into  port, 
full  of  comfort  and  cheer,  they  spread  the 
wonderful  news  abroad  that  they  had  brought 
unheard-of  riches  back  with  them. 

So  men  from  the  shore,  skilled  in  metal, 
came  eagerly  out  to  look  at  the  golden 
hoard.  They  peered  into  the  sacks  of 
treasure,  plunged  in  their  trembling  hands, 
and  let  the  dust  run  down  in  golden  streams 
against  the  sunlight.  Then  they  turned  to 
109 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

the  exultant  home-comers  with  scorn  and 
anger  in  their  eyes. 

"This  the  wealth  of  the  New  World !"  they 
cried.  "Did  you  ask  us  out  to  look  at  this? 
It  is  all  only  a  base  ore  of  iron,  you  unspeak- 
able simpletons!  All  your  hard-got  treasure 
is  nothing  but  Fools'  Gold ! " 

And  it  was  even  so.  The  weary,  dangerous 
voyaging,  the  searching  and  toil,  the  tedious 
passage  home,  had  all  been  only  for  this. 
They  had  a  cargo  of  worthless  pyrites ;  all 
their  labor  had  only  gotten  them  so  much 
paltry  Fools'  Gold. 

A  pitiful  story,  surely.  After  all  these 
years  one  feels  a  pang  of  sympathy  only  to 
think  of  it.  All  that  expectancy  and  labor, 
and  the  bitter  awakening  at  the  end !  Yet 
within  the  circle  of  our  own  experience, 
under  our  very  eyes,  we  often  see  an  even 
sadder  and  more  tragic  folly.  For  there  are 
many  earnest  and  laborious  men  and  women 
nowadays,  as  in  all  days,  who  in  their  own 
deluded  way  are  sedulous  gatherers  of 
shining  rubbish;  adventurous  voyagers  and 
patient  toilers,  it  may  be,  but  bringers  home 
of  nothing  but  Fools'  Gold. 

There  is  the  unhappy  man  who  will  tell 
you  that  he  is  quite  satisfied  with  doing  his 
110 


Fools1  Gold 

duty  by  his  neighbor,  and  harming  no  man, 
and  living  as  a  decent  fellow  should.  He 
does  not  see  any  especial  need  of  a  definite 
religion.  He  never  cared  much,  anyway,  for 
ceremonies  and  observances  and  doctrine.  A 
good,  clean,  upright  life  is  quite  enough  for 
him.  And  so  he  does,  sometimes,  go  to  great 
lengths  and  make  costly  efforts  and  sacrifices 
to  lead  a  clean  and  honorable  life  as  the 
world  sees  it.  Perhaps  he  is  by  nature  kindly 
and  courteous,  generous  and  just;  and  his 
days  go  by  in  fair  and  noble  outward  seeming, 
making  a  show  of  good  and  worthy  deeds. 
But,  alas,  for  all  the  outward  glitter  and 
show  of  goodness!  He  is  only  gathering 
heaps  of  silly  treasure,  painfully  loading  the 
precious  vessel  of  his  soul  with  worthless 
freightage  of  base  Fools'  Gold.  There  is  no 
substance  in  his  pretentious  virtue  if  it  lacks 
the  precious  touch  of  the  love  and  service  of 
God.  There  is  no  merit  in  hi.«  godless  good- 
ness, because  it  is  done  for  man  and  man's 
eye  only;  it  has  not  the  weight  and  lustre  of 
the  golden  grace  of  God. 

Again,    there    is   the    man    who   has    been 

brought  up  in  an  alien  creed,  yet  comes  some 

day  to  see  that  in  the  Catholic  Church,  and 

there  alone,   is  the    fulness   of   God's   truth. 

Ill 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

But  he  demurs  when  conscience  tells  him, 
"Your  place  is  there!"  "Oh,"  he  answers, 
"not  yet !  There  will  be  time  enough  for  such 
a  word.  There  will  be  ample  opportunity  for 
such  a  change  when  I  am  older  and  more 
interested  in  religious  thought.  God  cannot 
mean  me  to  turn  the  whole  current  of  my 
life  awry  just  at  this  time — this  specially 
inconvenient  time.  Let  me  bide  awhile  where 
I  am.  Why  should  one  put  oneself  in  such 
a  pother  the  very  moment  one  finds  out 
something  new?  And,  meantime,  can  I  not 
go  on  leading  a  good,  devout,  even  a  fervent, 
life  here  in  the  Church  in  which  I  was  born? 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  truth  to  be  found  in 
my  religion  too.  I  could  serve  God  better  as 
a  Catholic?  Very  true,  but  can  I  not  serve 
Him  quite  well  here?" 

Fools'  Gold!  Fools'  Gold!  When  one 
lineers  on  in  bad  faith  where  he  knows  that 
God  does  not  wish  him  to  be,  his  specious 
show  of  fervor  and  of  zeal  are  nothing 
worth.  He  may,  indeed,  put  on  all  the  out- 
ward shine  and  glitter  of  a  Christian  life. 
He  may  multiply  observance  on  observance, 
and  offer  many  works  which  God  does  not 
require,  to  balance  out  his  slowness  in  the 
one  thing  God  demands.  But  in  the  eyes  of 
112 


Fools'  Gold 

Heaven  are  not  his  acts  only  a  mockery  of 
justice  and  goodness?  Hard  words!  Yet 
are  they  not  sadly  and  pitifully  true?  Can 
not  God  see  in  these  pious  works  the  tinsel 
glitter  of  insincerity?  Is  not  such  a  man 
wilfully  delving  in  the  deceitful  river-sands 
of  heresy  and  error,  instead  of  the  deep 
mines  of  truth,  and  bringing  up,  with  all  his 
sweat  and  labor,  only  Fools'  Gold  to  meet  the 
eyes  of  God? 

Again  (and  this  is  the  saddest  case  of  all), 
there  is  the  fallen-off  Catholic,  who  was  once 
faithful,  earnest  and  devout,  but  has  let  his 
fervor  and  service  dwindle  slowly  away  into 
tepidity  and  carelessness.  He  lives  quite 
frankly  a  godless  life,  just  as  does  the  pagan 
world  around  him.  He  does  not  deny  the 
Faith  in  theory,  only  he  calmly  disregards  it 
in  practice.  Its  restraints  and  observances 
are  far  too  rigid,  too  uneasy  and  exacting  for 
his  idea  of  comfort  and  of  peace.  And  yet 
in  his  secret  heart  he  cherishes  a  hope  that 
he  may  somehow  serve  both  God  and 
Mammon,  that  God  will  somehow  be  content 
with  the  good  he  does,  and  not  be  too  strict 
and  stern  with  him  for  the  good  he  fails  to 
do.  He  has  a  lingering  expectation  that  his 
honest  life,  his  kindness  to  his  friends,  his 
113 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

doing  hurt  to  no  man,  may  raise  him  just 
as  safely  to  Heaven  as  some  of  those  anxious 
folk  who  never  miss  Mass  on  Sunday  and 
are  so  solicitous  in  keeping  the  precepts  of 
the  Church.  Is  not  his  fair-dealing  a  glorious 
and  goodly  thing?  Are  not  his  courtesy  and 
good  feeling  holy  and  blessed,  and  will  not 
his  clean  life  here  be  found  worthy  of  the 
eternal  life  to  come? 

Fools'  Gold!  Fools'  GoW!  Fools'  Gold! 
What  is  all  this  material  goodness  in  the 
eyes  of  God,  who  has  deigned  to  make 
known  the  very  precise  and  definite  service 
which  He  jealously  requires,  and  who  finds 
that  wished-for  service  insolently  slighted 
and  denied?  What  would  an  employer  think 
or  say  if  he  found  his  employee  taking  his 
own  ease  and  pleasure,  doing  his  own  sweet 
will  in  everything,  and  seeking  to  make  up 
for  this  neglect  of  duty  by  pleasant  manners 
and  a  winning  smile?  Surely,  he  who  has 
known  the  fulness  of  supernatural  truth,  and 
who  turns  from  the  practice  of  our  blessed 
Faith  to  seek  his  happiness  here  and  here- 
after in  the  empty  exercise  of  merely  natural 
and  pagan  virtues,  is  of  all  men  the  vainest 
gatherer  of  vainest  dross  against  the  dreadful 
Day  of  God! 

114 


Fools'  Gold 

And  so  one  might  go  on  with  example 
after  example  of  men  now-a-days  who  carry 
on  the  outward  show  of  a  blameless  and 
upright  life,  but  whose  works  are  mockery 
and  their  good  deeds  a  delusion  for  want  of 
the  touch  of  grace  and  faith,  for  lack  of  the 
true  ring  and  lustre  of  heavenly  merit  which 
only  grace  and  faith  can  give. 

But  what  have  all  these  reflections  to  do 
with  us  others,  who  are  neither  contemners 
of  religion  nor  followers  of  an  alien  creed? 
Only  this !  We  know,  or  we  should  know, 
very  clearly  the  false  gold  from  the  true. 
Suppose  there  had  been  with  those  hapless 
adventurers  some  man  skilled  in  metallurgy, 
who  could  have  told  at  a  glance  the  false 
gold  from  the  real.  Would  it  not  have  been 
a  crying  shame,  a  terrible  sin  in  him,  not  to 
call  out,  and  protest,  and  warn  the  deluded 
crew  that  they  were  wasting  their  trouble 
and  their  toil?  Would  it  not  have  been 
simple  madness  for  him  to  have  acquiesced 
in  their  vain  delight,  and  caught  the  prevalent 
enthusiasm,  and  sympathized  with  their  fools' 
joy  in  their  fools'  treasure? 

Yet  how  many  Catholic  men  and  women 
who  know  full  well  that  those  who  are  near 
to  them,  and  dear,  are  living  in  a  fools' 
115 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

paradise  of  delusion  and  heaping  up  worth- 
less and  tinsel  deeds  against  the  great  trying- 
day,  are  deaf  to  the  kindness  and  duty  which 
bids  them  warn  these  gatherers  of  Fools' 
Gold? 

"Oh,  he,  or  she,  is  so  good,  so  upright,  so 
generous,"  we  hear  them  say  of  these  deluded 
ones.  "Why,  he  is  better  than  many  Catholics ; 
why  should  I  trouble  him  with  advice?" 

Why  tell  him,  in  other  words,  that  he  is 
heaping  up  false  treasures,  bogus  gold? 
Why  say  the  word  of  warning  and  remon- 
strance? Why  show  our  uneasiness,  our 
distress  and  disapproval  of  this  squandering 
of  precious  lives,  this  wasting  of  effort  and 
of  time  that  will  never  count  for  Heaven? 

We  do  not  act  so,  as  we  have  said  before, 
in  matters  where  earthly  treasure  is  in 
question,  where  money,  lands,  goods,  are 
the  stake.  If  we  see  a  friend  of  ours 
wasting  his  toil  in  a  bogus  venture,  or 
spending  good  money  on  worthless  stock,  we 
hurry  and  give  him  the  word.  May  we  not 
do  as  much  in  matters  of  eternal  moment, 
when  the  gold  at  stake  is  the  gold  of  heavenly 
merit,  with  which  a  man  must  buy  of  his 
God  the  Kingdom  without  end? 

Is  not  this  one  reason  why  so  many 
116 


Fools'  Gold 

Catholics  fall  away  little  by  little  from  all 
pious  observance  and  go  down  by  gentle 
grades,  down  the  easy  slope  of  indifference 
to  the  sloughs  of  unbelief,  because  their  own 
people,  who  live  at  their  side,  do  not  reach 
out  a  hand  in  time  to  save  them? 

They  remark,  of  course,  the  first  begin- 
nings, the  youthful  piety  growing  chill,  the 
old  fidelity  at  Mass  and  at  Communion 
waxing  slack  and  poor.  Now  a  Sunday 
morning  abed,  no  holy  Mass ;  now  a  slighting 
word  about  sacred  things  that  shows  that  the 
soul  is  growing  cold.  If  we  would  only  aid 
them  then!  If  we  would  only  stop  them 
there  in  the  first  steps  of  their  downward 
course,  when  a  little  leap  would  put  them  on 
the  sunny  heights  again. 

We  need  not  take  them  aside  and  put  on 
a  solemn  look  and  lecture  them.  Need  not! 
Often  it  would  be  a  most  silly  and  ineffective 
way.  But  a  quiet  word,  when  we  see  their 
ears  are  open  and  their  heart  is  ready,  a 
sorrowful  look  when  we  feel  sure  they  will 
understand.  Not  many  words  are  necessary 
when  a  friend  speaks  lovingly  to  his  friend. 

And  if  we,  their  own  friends,  their  own 
people,  refuse  this  easy,  necessary  work  of 
love,  who  else  under  Heaven  is  to  attend  to 
117 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

it?  God  has  put  them  in  our  hands,  as  he 
puts  all  men  into  the  hands  of  other  men. 
Can  a  stranger  do  it?  Can  even  the  priest? 
How  is  he  to  know  of  the  small  and  faint 
beginnings?  When  he  is  besought  to  work 
a  change  the  harm  is  already  done.  Our 
friend  whom  we  could  have  saved  when  his 
evil  course  was  just  commencing  has  now 
strayed  far  away  from  Church  and  priest 
and  altar;  he  hears  all  pious  exhortations 
with  a  hard  air  of  self-sufficient  unbelief. 

Little  by  little  the  fervor  of  his  youth 
cooled  away;  but  now  he  is  quite  cold.  The 
priest,  who  could  not  have  hindered  the  evil, 
can  scarcely  begin  to  cure  it  now.  Only  you, 
whose  word,  whose  look,  might  have  kept  off 
the  mortal  sickness,  only  you  can  bring  it 
medicine.  You  must  begin,  even  now,  now 
at  this  late  and  evil  day,  and  little  by  little 
win  him  back  again. 

"But  one  must  be  prudent  and  tactful  and 
discreet!  It  does  not  do  to  speak  much  on 
such  subjects,  one  may  so  easily  do  more 
harm  than  good !  Rather  than  say  or  do  too 
much,  isn't  it  often  better  to  let  such  folk 
alone?" 

Yes,  by  all  means,  let  us  be  prudent  and 
discreet,  but  when  were  such  precious  gifts 
118 


Fools'  Gold 

as  prudence  and  tact  required  for  such  an 
easy  thing  as  merely  letting  our  erring  friends 
alone?  Indifference  and  laziness  would  seem 
quite  sufficient  for  that.  No,  our  tact  and 
prudence  may  come  into  glorious  play  in 
choosing  the  time  and  the  manner  of  bringing 
them  to  see  the  sad  emptiness  of  their 
fictitious  virtue,  the  melancholy  delusion  of 
their  sedulous  gatherings  of  base  Fools' 
Gold !  There  one  may  find  grand  scope  for 
every  particle  of  prudence  and  of  tact  which 
he  has  got  or  God  has  given  him ! 

In  sober  truth  it  is  a  difficult  task  to  open 
men's  eyes  to  their  own  amazing  folly,  and 
point  them  out  the  worthlessness  of  their 
laborious  lives,  spent  apart  from  the  will  and 
the  service  of  God.  It  is  a  task  which  one 
might  well  refuse  to  enter  on  at  all,  were 
not  men's  very  souls  the  stake  for  which  we 
toil.  But  God  has  put  our  brothers'*  destiny 
in  the  hands  of  us  other  men,  and  set  us 
near  them  to  warn  them — tactfully,  discreetly 
always — lest  they  waste  all  their  precious 
lives  in  gathering  Fools'  Gold!  Let  us  not 
suffer  our  own  sloth  or  reluctance  or  false 
diffidence  to  hold  us  back,  where  we  see  our 
duty  clear  and  recognize  the  urgent  need. 
For  we  may  quiet  our  consciences  now,  and 
119 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

justify  our  own  non-interference  with  many 
specious  arguments;  but  what  will  our  friends 
whom  we  have  not  warned  and  counseled 
say  to  us,  think  of  us,  when  they  have  got 
past  that  moment  of  terrible  awakening  and 
revelation  which  is  the  lightning-flash  of  the 
judgment  of  God? 

"You  knew  and  you  did  not  tell  us,  you 
saw  and  you  did  not  cry  out  in  warning  and 
fear !  You  let  us,  your  own  people,  fill  our 
hands  with  false  and  bogus  riches,  gather  up 
for  the  eye  of  a  Judge  who  knows  no  deceiv- 
ing the  worthless  dross  and  ore  that  has  no 
price  nor  value  in  Heaven !  All  the  while 
you  knew  that  we  should  go  poor,  and  naked, 
and  mean  before  the  eye  of  God.  And  yet 
you  left  us  so  long  to  gather  the  tinsel  of 
seeming  good  works  without  love  or  grace 
or  merit.  Fools'  Gold!  Oh,  you  unkind 
friends!  Fools'  Gold!" 


120 


Christ  and  Zaccheua 


THE  ETHICS  OF  SATURDAY  NIGHT 

SAID  Paterfamilias  not  long  ago:  "These 
Saturday  nights  are  getting  to  be  the 
plague  of  my  life !" 

"How  so?"  queried  his  friend. 

"Well,  you  see,  some  six  of  my  children 
are  just  in  the  age  when  'society'  is  in  their 
dreams.  And  somehow  or  other — oh,  indeed, 
the  reason's  quite  plain ! — the  dances  and 
dinners  and  theatre  parties  must  all  be  on 
Saturday  night.  So  they  come  to  me  for 
leave  to  go  out — Saturday  night !  If  I  refuse 
them, — as  I  often  have  in  conscience  to  do — 
of  course  there  are  wailings  and  meanings 
till  Monday  at  least.  If  I  let  them  go,  you 
can  fancy  what  happens  next  morning.  They 
get  home  in  the  wee  sma'  hours  and  are  all 
so  desperately  weary,  and  sleepy,  and  sulky 
and  sad !  They  do  not  miss  Mass, — they  are 
too  well  brought  up  for  that, — but  their 
mother  has  all  manner  of  trouble  to  rouse 
them  on  time,  and  what  sort  of  prayers  do 
you  think  they  can  give  the  good  God,  when 
their  heads  are  all  fuddled  with  sleep?" 

"I  see.     It  is  awkward,"  said  the  listener. 
"But  why  always  Saturday  night?" 
121 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

"Why  ?  How  innocent  you  are !"  answered 
Paterfamilias  with  a  rueful  sort  of  a  smile. 
"Because  we,  who  are  so  largely  a  pagan 
people,  are  getting  to  pagan  customs  as  well. 
Because  only  two  out  of  ten  of  our  men  go 
to  church  of  a  Sunday.  For  the  remainder, 
the  Lord's  day  is  Morpheus'  day,  a  day  not 
so  much  of  rest  as  of  sleep.  To  sleep  one's 
head  off  Sunday  morning  is  so  much  the 
fashion  that  men  who  work  hard  all  the 
week,  and  so  must  go  to  bed  betimes,  can  be 
got  to  stay  up  till  all  hours  Saturday  night. 
Sunday  morning,  you  know,  they  can  lie 
a-bed  if  they  like,  and  sleep  until  noon." 

"Now  that  you  mention  it,"  said  his  friend 
with  a  thoughtful  air,  "I  do  seem  to  have 
noticed  rather  a  leaning  to  'have  things'  on 
Saturday  night.  The  week's  end  dinner  and 
dance  at  the  club  must  be  on  Saturday  night. 
The  social  organizations  meet  of  a  Saturday 
night,  the  theatres  are  crowded  then — and  it 
surely  tempts  even  our  Catholic  people  to 
stay  up  much  later  than  ever  they  should,  if 
Sunday  is  to  see  them  properly  at  Mass." 

"Oh,    and    the    trouble    doesn't    end    even 

there!"      said      Paterfamilias      despondent1}-. 

"These    hilarious    Saturday    nights    and    the 

drowsy    Sundays    after    them,    are    teaching 

122 


The  Ethics  of  Saturday  Night 

our  people  to  look  on  any  religious  exercise 
of  a"  Sunday  as  a  burdensome  appendage, 
instead  of  its  being,  as  they  used  to  think, 
the  proper  way  to  spend  a  part  of  the  day 
of  rest.  Mass  they  will  go  to,  grudgingly, — 
the  later  and  the  shorter  the  better, — and  if 
there  is  no  sermon,  better  still !  But  all  the 
old-time  practices  of  devotion,  the  beads  at 
home  where  all  the  family  pray  together, 
Benediction  and  Vespers  of  a  Sunday  after- 
noon,— these  things  are  quite  beside  the  mark 
for  them.  A  hurried  Mass,  a  sleep  and  a 
walk,  a  rummage  through  the  sickly-smelling 
Sunday  papers,  a  more  or  less  gentle  head- 
ache from  last  night's  sleeplessness,  then 
Monday ;  and  how  much  of  their  Sunday  has 
been  for  God?  Only  so  much  as  one  must 
give  to  save  one  from  a  mortal  sin!" 

"A  sad  state  of  things,"  said  the  other; 
"how  shall  we  cure  it?" 

"Hard  to  think!  The  priests  might  preach 
against  it,  but  it  would  take  a  deal  of  preach- 
ing to  cry  the  evil  down.  It  is  in  the  air. 
Everyone  goes  out  of  Saturday  night;  one 
is  a  poke  and  a  bigot  if  he  ventures  to  inveigh 
against  it." 

"I    know    of    one    way,"    said   the    friend, 
speaking    slowly    and    thoughtfully,    "a   very 
123 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

effective  way,  too,  though  not  pleasant  at 
first,  I  dare  say.  Down  in  Virginia,  where  I 
go  in  the  Summer,  there  lives  a  good  mother 
who  has  solved  a  very  similar  problem,  all 
by  herself.  She  has  five  stalwart  sons  and 
three  daughters,  who  are,  as  you  may  fancy, 
the  pride  of  her  heart.  One  of  the  sons  and 
one  of  the  daughters  are  married,  but  the 
rest  are  the  soul  of  the  social  life  there- 
abouts, and  nothing  is  quite  successful  unless 
the  Warners  are  there.  Well,  now  comes 
the  point  of  the  story.  Do  you  know" — and 
he  planted  an  emphatic  finger  on  the  other's 
knee — "that  whenever  any  soul  in  that  town, 
Jew  or  Gentile,  or  Sleep-o'-Sunday  though 
he  or  she  may  be,  wants  to  give  an  entertain- 
ment and  choses  a  day  to  give  it,  the  first 
question  they  ask  is  this:  'Is  the  day  after 
that  the  first  Friday  of  the  month?'  Then 
there  is  a  rush  for  the  calendars,  and  if  they 
find  the  next  day  is  'First  Friday,'  the  date 
they  have  chosen  is  changed  out  of  hand. 
And  why?  Because,  as  they  all  of  them 
know  and  say,  'the  Warners  won't  come! 
They  always  go  to  church  with  their  mothei 
on  the  first  Friday,  you  know.'  So  they  do, 
all  the  nine  of  them,  and  up  to  the  altar-rail 
with  her,  to  honor  the  Sacred  Heart.  You 
124 


The  Ethics  of  Saturday  Night 

can  fancy  whether  an  example  like  that  makes 
an  impression  or  no !" 

"I  imagine  it  does,"  said  Paterfamilias 
admiringly,  stroking  his  chin.  "If  we  had 
enough  of  such  mothers  and  children  most 
of  our  urgent  questions  would  solve  them- 
selves with  a  rush." 

This  bit  of  serious  talk,  which  is  here  very 
plainly  set  down  pretty  much  as  it  came 
from  the  speakers'  own  lips,  is  worth  think- 
ing over  by  every  good  Catholic  of  us  who 
wants  God's  way  to  prevail  in  the  world. 
Isn't  it  true  that  Sunday,  as  the  Lord's  day, 
is  vanishing  fast  from  our  lives?  That  is 
the  way  with  the  spirit  of  the  world.  If  it 
cannot  quite  crush  out  our  feasts,  it  will 
tamper  with  them  and  change  them  until 
they  are  something  quite  different  from  what 
God  meant  when  He  bade  them  to  be.  It 
has  changed  Christmas  so;  and  Christmas,  to 
more  than  half  of  the  world,  is  now  a 
feverish  season  of  feasting  and  gifts,  with 
the  Christ  Child  still  in  His  stable  and  a 
queer  oaf,  called  Santy,  perched  up  on  the 
throne.  On  All  Hallows'  Eve,  and  on  Easter, 
what  do  the  little  ones  think  of  most — the 
Holy  Souls  and  the  risen  Saviour,  or  silly 
jokes  and  colored  Easter  eggs?  Shall  we  let 
125 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

the  peace  and  rest  and  prayer  of  Sunday 
pass  from  the  world  and  give  place  to  a  feast 
of  sleep-after-revel,  a  time  to  recover  from 
the  follies  of  Saturday  night? 

Paterfamilias  was  right.  If  we  Catholics 
stood  sturdily  out  for  a  clear  head  and  a 
tranquil  heart  for  Sunday  morning,  and 
refused  to  make  revel  of  Saturday  night, 
the  evil  custom  would  change.  We  are  too 
many,  too  widespread,  too  necessary,  we 
Catholics,  for  most  social  gatherings  to  be 
quite  complete  unless  we  choose  to  go.  Let 
us  not  choose  to  go  of  Saturday  nights,  nor 
on  Thursdays  before  our  First  Friday  Com- 
munion, nor  on  the  eves  of  any  of  the  great 
sacred  festivals.  Above  all,  we  will  not  set 
our  own  entertainments  on  those  days,  and 
so  lead  other  folks  into  the  temptation  of 
spending  their  Sundays  amiss. 

When  we  are  asked  out  ourselves  on  a 
date  that  happens  just  to  be  Saturday  night, 
and  there  is  no  very  urgent  reason  why  it 
should  be  Saturday  rather  than  any  other  of 
the  seven  long  days  of  the  week,  what  a  neat 
little,  kind  little,  helpful  little  deed  it  would 
be  to  give,  with  an  air  of  friendly  surprise 
some  such  answer  as  this: 

"Why,  that's  Saturday,  you  know !  Can't 
126 


The  Ethics  of  Saturday  Night 

we  make  it  another  time?  I  don't  just  like 
being  up  late  on  Saturday  night.  It  makes 
one  so  heavy  and  sleepy  on  Sunday  morning, 
and  I  detest  being  drowsy  and  stupid  at 
Mass." 

If  all  of  us  Catholics  had  the  courage  and 
zeal  to  answer  like  this,  what  would  become, 
I  wonder,  of  the  Sleep-o'-Sunday  folk  and 
their  revels  of  Saturday  night? 

"But,"  some  one  will  say  "Saturday  night 
is  the  only  night  of  all  the  week  when  I  am 
free  to  do  as  I  choose — to  have  a  little 
pleasure  and  rest  and  be  with  my  friends." 
Very  true.  But,  honestly,  do  you  feel  rested, 
and  happy,  and  calm  •*  after  the  excitement 
and  wear  of  Saturday  night?  Would  not 
you  and  your  friends  be  better  and  happier 
of  a  Sunday  morning  if  your  Saturday  night 
had  been  passed  in  some  quiet  and  cheerful 
amusement,  which  leaves  off  betimes,  and 
sends  you  tranquil  to  sleep? 

Men  are  like  sheep.  However  rocky  the 
road,  some  one  must  break  from  the  beaten 
way  before  the  flock  will  turn,  but  when  one 
man  takes  to  better  ways  he  will  carry  many 
along  with  him. 


127 


THE  POOR-  OUR  CREDITORS 

IS  it  not  enough  to  make  us  tremble,  to 
see  how  many  otherwise  good,  and  even 
fervent,  Catholics,  habitually  neglect  Christ's 
solemn  admonition  to  help  the  poor?  "The 
poor  indeed  you  have  always  with  you,"  so 
we  seldom  can  plead  a  lack  of  opportunity 
for  putting  into  practice  the  grave  command- 
ment of  our  Lord. 

In  town  and  country,  now  as  ever,  they 
are  always  with  us,  needy  and  numerous; — 
not  only  the  poor  who  have  become  so  by 
their  own  fault  or  negligence,  but  the  inno- 
cent poor,  the  victims  of  a  mother's  sloth  or 
a  father's  crime.  What  excruciating  mis- 
eries they  suffer!  The  weakness  of  hunger, 
the  agonies  of  shame,  the  pang  of  anxious 
uncertainty  as  to  whence  shall  come  their 
evening's  shelter  and  to-morrow's  food;  the 
hopelessness  of  utter  indigence, — these  are 
often  with  them,  and  threaten  them  always. 

The  child  wails  to  its  mother  for  food, 
but  the  mother  herself  is  faint  with  hunger. 
The  mother  sees  her  little  ones  perishing 
from  want  and  shivering  with  cold,  and  she 
weeps  before  her  husband  and  their  father. 
128 


The  Poor— Our  Creditors 

But  he,  too,  perhaps,  is  crushed  with  poverty 
and  feeble  with  disease,  and  he  looks  on  in 
despairing  agony,  unable  to  relieve  them. 
They  cry  aloud  to  their  Father  in  Heaven, 
who  has  compassion  on  the  least  thing  that 
lives,  and  who  hears  the  young  ravens  when 
they  call  to  Him  for  food.  But  that  infinitely 
merciful  and  tender  Father  is  a  God  of  order 
and  of  law,  and  He  has  given  man  into  man's 
keeping,  and  put  the  relief  of  the  wretched 
into  the  hands  of  his  fellow-men. 

It  is  to  us,  then,  that  the  hungry  and 
destitute  must  turn  at  last,  as  to  their  ap- 
pointed saviours  from  misery  and  distress. 
Do  we  minister  to  them  in  tenderness  and 
compassion,  or  are  we  so  thoughtless  in  our 
comfortable  plenty,  as  to  deny  these  wretched 
ones  the  little  aid  they  seek?  Ah,  when  our 
own  children  gather  round  us,  clean  and  fair 
and  merry,  well-clad  and  well-housed  against 
cold  and  storm,  innocent  of  hunger  and  of 
shame,  we  must  let  our  thoughts  wander  in 
pity  from  their  bright  looks,  safe  as  they 
are  in  the  sheltered  ways  of  happy  childhood, 
to  the  wretched  shanty  where  lurk  the  squalid 
children  of  the  poor.  Christ  prays  us  to  have 
pity, — at  least  upon  the  little  ones;  to  take 
compassion  in  a  practical  way,  on  neglected 
129 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

children,  ragged,  shivering  and  weeping,  cold 
and  hungry,  ignorant,  it  may  be,  and  aban- 
doned. The  leavings  of  many  a  table  would 
make  them  a  banquet ;  the  cast-off  clothing 
of  richer  little  ones  would  be  a  decent  cov- 
ering to  wrap  their  wasted  limbs ;  a  little  part 
of  the  money  spent  in  mere  indulgence  would 
mean  to  them  very  life,  and  happiness,  and 
cheerful  hope. 

But  this  is  not  all.  There  is  another  thought 
which  to  some  of  us  may  prove  more  pierc- 
ing and  more  moving  still.  We  are  the 
almoners  of  God.  He  has  given  man  into 
the  hands  of  man,  and  made  each  one's 
brother  his  keeper.  "Love  thy  neighbor,"  is 
second  only  to  "Love  thy  God."  Now  the 
wail  of  the  starving  poor  is  going  up  for- 
ever around  us,  and  near  us,  even  at  our 
very  doors.  What  meaning  has  that  inces- 
sant, piteous  crying  of  hungry  hearts  and  of 
hungry  bodies,  in  the  ever-listening  ears  of 
God?  Alas!  May  it  not  be  an  unceasing 
though  unconscious  accusation, — an  indict- 
ment uttered  loud  and  strong  against  us  at 
the  dreadful  bar  of  the  Most  High?  And 
shall  we  answer  to  that  charge,  that  we  were 
thoughtless  and  distracted  and  busied  with 
our  own  concerns, — when  we  have  such  com- 
130 


The  Poor— Our  Creditors 

mands  and  often-repeated  warnings?  Or  is 
this  a  light  duty,  to  be  easily  disregarded,  or 
a  trifling  opportunity  for  merit,  to  be  readily 
forgotten,  when  Christ  Himself  has  declared: 
"Amen,  I  say  unto  you  as  long  as  you  did 
it  to  one  of  these  My  least  brethren,  you  did 
it  unto  Me.  As  long  as  you  did  it  not  to  one 
of  these  My  least  brethren,  you  did  it  not 
unto  Me"? 

Would  that  it  were  only  the  very  rich  in 
this  world's  goods  who  stood  in  danger  of 
this  grave  charge  and  stern  accounting! 
Would  that  those  of  us  were  at  least  exempt, 
who  are  poor  ourselves,  and  can  scarcely  give 
an  alms  in  money  or  in  food !  But  the  pre- 
cept is  most  broad,  the  needy  •  are  without 
number,  their  wants,  various  and  manifold, 
so  that  there  is  not  one  of  us  who  cannot 
give  alms  of  some  sort,  if  willing  to  do  so, 
and  there  is  not  one  of  us  who  can  give  but 
is  held  by  this  command  of  God.  Nor  does 
our  personal  inability  to  minister  to  the  poor 
excuse  us,  for  there  is  the  Society  of  St. 
Vincent  de  Paul,  with  many  other  charitable 
societies,  ready  to  be  our  vicar ;  nor  does 
even  the  lack  of  earthly  goods  acquit  us,  for 
we  can  give  at  least  the  alms  of  prayer. 

God  speaks,  it  is  true, — as  we  speak  most 
131 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

commonly, — of  corporal  aid  and  corn  fort, 
but  these,  after  all,  are  things  of  lesser  im- 
port,— types  and  figures  of  the  aid  we  ^we 
to  our  neighbor's  spirit;  of  the  alms  we 
should  give,  of  love  to  his  needy  heart,  of 
faith  to  his  starving  soul.  God  speaks  in 
terms  of  temporal  aid  for  this  further  reason 
also,  that  the  body  must  be  fed  and  clothed 
before  the  spirit  can  be  strengthened,  and  he 
who  lets  his  neighbor  thirst,  or  starve,  or  lie 
uncared  for  in  sickness  or  imprisonment, 
when  he  might  easily  aid  him,  will  scarcely 
have  the  countenance  to  pretend  concern  for 
his  sick  heart,  or  lonely  soul. 

It  is,  then,  a  salutary  thing  for  us  all  to 
read  this  precept  over,  as  it  is  written  in 
many  ways  and  for  many  ages,  by  prophets, 
sages  and  saints ;  and  to  take  it  practically  to 
heart.  And  there  is  perhaps  no  other  place 
in  the  whole  cycle  of  the  scriptures  where  its 
weight  is  forced  upon  us  so  emphatically  as 
in  the  description  of  that  last  great  Judgment 
where  the  warnings  of  the  Eternal  reach  a 
sanction  and  a  summing-up,  in  the  momen- 
tous sentence  to  be  pronounced  on  man, 
before  he  goes  forth  to  everlasting  joy  or 
woe.  How  strange  in  our  ears  are  the  warn- 
ing words  of  that  sentence,  as  Christ  has 
132 


The  Poor — Our  Creditors 

told  them  to  us.  "Then  shall  the  King  say  to 
them  that  shall  be  on  His  right  hand:  Come, 
ye  blessed  of  My  Father,  possess  you  the 
kingdom  prepared  for  you  from  the  founda- 
tion of  the  world.  For  I  was  hungry,  and 
you  gave  Me  to  eat;  I  was  thirsty,  and  you 
gave  Me  to  drink;  I  was  a  stranger,  and  you 
took  Me  in :  naked,  and  you  covered  Me : 
sick,  and  you  visited  Me :  I  was  in  prison,  and 
you  came  to  Me.  .  .  .  Then  He  shall 
say  to  them  also  that  shall  be  on  His  left 
hand:  Depart  from  Me,  you  cursed,  .  .  . 
For  I  was  hungry  and  you  gave  Me  not  to 
eat:  .  .  .  naked,  and  you  covered  Me  not. 
sick  and  in  prison  and  you  did  not  visit  Me. 
Then  they  also  shall  answer  Him,  saying: 
Lord  when  did  we  see  Thee  hungry,  or 
thirsty,  or  a  stranger,  or  naked,  or  sick,  or  in 
prison,  and  did  not  minister  to  Thee?  Then 
He  shall  answer  them,  saying:  Amen  I  say 
to  you,  as  long  as  you  did  it  not  to  one  of 
these  least,  neither  did  you  do  it  to  Me.  And 
these  shall  go  into  everlasting  punishment : 
but  the  just,  into  life  everlasting."  Matt, 
xxv,  34-46. 

No  word  here  of  murder,  or  blasphemy,  or 
the  seven  deadly  sins ;  or  any  of  those  offences 
from  which  in  our  inward  searchings  we  are 
133 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

likely  to  thank  Heaven  we  are  so  free.  No; 
but  the  just  are  to  be  rewarded  and  the 
wicked  to  be  condemned  on  this  strange 
standard:  "Have  ye  fed  the  hungry,  clothed 
the  naked,  visited  the  sick  and  the  im- 
prisoned? Have  ye  pitied  the  wretched  and 
needy  with  an  active  pity,  and  succored  them 
in  their  distress?"  Not  that  other  good  deeds 
are  disregarded,  nor  that  other  crimes  shall 
fail  of  their  just  retribution  on  that  awful 
day.  But  it  is  of  these  works  of  charity 
that  we  are  most  strongly  .reminded,  because 
it  is  these  that  even  good  men  seem  likeliest 
to  forget.  Let  us  heed,  then,  our  Saviour's 
warning  and  take  pity  on  the  distressed.  Let 
us  be  good  stewards  and  faithful  almoners, 
spending  our  goods  and  labor,  with  care  and 
gentleness  and  love,  on  the  helpless  members 
of  Christ's  family,  the  great,  piteous,  suffer- 
ing multitude  of  His  destitute  poor. 


134 


OUR  HOLIER  SELVES 

THE  path  of  good  endeavor,  of  toil  for 
your  neighbor  and  you  is  always  steep, 
as  our  Lord  foretold  it  would  be;  but  besides 
being  steep,  it  grows  very  weary  and  dusty 
betimes,  and  we  need  some  cheery  thought  to 
brighten  our  hearts  on  the  way.  Now  the 
feasts  of  the  Church  are  like  springs  by  the 
roadside,  each  with  its  cooling  and  strength- 
ening flood  of  holy,  encouraging  thought. 
And  of  all  the  feasts  of  the  year,  Easter 
brings  us  courage  and  strength ;  for  Easter, 
besides  being  the  Feast  of  Christ's  Resurrec- 
tion, is  also  in  a  special  way  the  Feast  of  our 
holier  selves! 

"Our  holier  selves!  What  in  the  world 
does  he  mean?" 

Let  St.  Paul  explain  for  me,  so  that  I  may 
not  seem  to  be  saying  any  new  thing  not 
vouched  for  by  the  Church.  In  that  first 
magnificent  Epistle  of  his  to  the  Christians  of 
Corinth,  in  the  fifteenth  chapter,  after  he  has 
told  them  of  the  Resurrection  of  our  Lord, 
the  Apostle  repeats  again  and  again,  utterly 
to  confound  some  rash  deniers  of  it,  this 
truth  which  rings  like  a  trumpet-call,  to  stir 
135 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

us  up  to  effort,  hope  and  longing:  "But  if 
there  be  no  resurrection  of  the  dead,  then 
Christ  is  not  risen  again.  .  .  For  if  the 
dead  rise  not  again,  neither  is  Christ  risen 
again.  .  .  Awake,  ye  just,  and  sin  not. 
.  .  .  For  there  are  bodies  celestial  and 
bodies  terrestrial.  .  .  It  is  sown  in  corrup- 
tion, it  shall  rise  in  incorruption.  It  is  sown 
in  dishonor,  it  shall  rise  in  glory.  .  .  The 
first  man  was  of  the  earth,  earthly:  the  sec- 
ond man,  from  heaven,  heavenly.  .  .  There- 
fore as  we  have  borne  the  image  of  the 
earthly,  let  us  bear  also  the  image  of  the 
heavenly." 

The  Resurrection  of  our  Lord,  then,  which 
we  hail  with  Easter  joy  is  only  the  first  fruit 
of  that  great  and  general  resurrection  when 
we,  too,  who  shall  have  laid  down  our  earthly 
selves  in  death,  may  hope  to  rise  in  everlasting 
glory  clad  in  our  holier  selves  forever  more! 

That  holier  self  of  ours !  It  is  sweet  to 
think  how  fair,  how  goodly  and  how  glorious 
it  shall  be,  if  only  we  are  steadfast  in  God's 
grace.  Here  on  earth,  as  wre  grow  gradually 
to  know  ourselves  better  and  better,  we  see 
with  increasing  self-contempt  all  the  sad 
havoc  that  our  forefathers'  sins  and  our  own 
sins  have  worked  in  our  minds  and  hearts 
136 


Christ  Praying  in  the  Synagogue 


Our  Holier  Selves 

and  wills.  Even  with  proud,  ungodly  met? 
this  knowledge  begets  a  secret  self-disgust 
that  grows  deeper  and  deeper  in  them  through 
the  years;  while  in  the  hearts  of  the  Saints 
it  flowers  out  into  the  white  blossom  of 
humility. 

But  on  some  happy  day,  if  we  cleave 
valiantly  to  God,  we  shall  be  changed.  The 
stroke  of  death  will  ease  us  of  our  broken 
body,  the  keen  and  fiery  bath  of  Purgatory 
will  leave  our  souls  all  clean  and  fit  for 
Heaven.  Then  the  light  of  glory  will  trans- 
form us  in  a  twinkling  from  the  poor  earthly 
selves  we  know  too  well  to  the  fair,  heavenly 
selves  that  shall  be  ours  for  days  eternal ! 

It  is  a  pleasant  thing  to  dwell  on  that 
celestial  and  immortal  beauty  and  dignity 
which  will  adorn  us,  soul  and  body,  as  we 
walk  with  all  the  other  Saints  of  Heaven 
through  the  bright  mansions  of  our  Father's 
home.  Ear  hath  not  heard,  eye  hath  not 
seen,  what  a  glorious  and  supernal  loveliness 
shall  clothe  about  even  the  least  of  that  great, 
princely  multitude.  The  noblest  mind,  the 
tenderest,  truest  heart  that  ever  was  on  earth, 
or  that  poet's  fancy  ever  dreamed,  or  flat- 
terer's pencil  ever  drew,  is  very  far  beneath 
the  bright  reality  that  shall  be  ours  in  Heaven ! 
137 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

There  is  another  aspect  to*  this  thought  of 
our  holier  selves  which  Easter  brings,  on 
which  we  should  often  dwell  to  stir  ourselves 
to  valiant  deeds  for  God.  Even  now  we 
carry  in  our  souls  the  seed,  the  earnest  and 
the  pledge  of  all  that  glory  and  that  loveliness. 
For  the  -seed  of  our  heavenly  selves  is 
Sanctifying  Grace. 

With  every  holy  act  of  ours  which  merits 
increase  of  our  glory  in  Heaven,  the  hand 
of  God  sows  a  new  measure  of  this  precious 
seed  in  our  souls.  Each  day  that  we  go  forth 
to  do  God's  will  and  please  our  Father  in 
Heaven,  we  come  home  richer  unspeakably 
in  this  celestial  treasure.  So  long  as  we 
serve  God  and  keep  our  souls  from  grievous 
sins,  our  store  of  the  precious  seed  of  glory 
grows  and  grows, — and  when  the  light  of 
God's  eternal  sunshine  falls  upon  us  and  we 
wake  into  His  halls  of  everlasting  joy  and 
peace,  the  seed  of  Sanctifying  Grace  which 
we  have  got  with  pain  and  toil  through  the 
long  labors  of  a  holy  life  will  spring  suddenly 
to  flower  in  our  souls  and  bodies,  and  we 
shall  blossom  forth  to  that  especial  brightness 
of  eternal  glory  which  corresponds  to  the 
very  measure  of  the  Grace  which  our  good 
works  have  laid  up  in  our  souls! 
138 


Our  Holier  Selves 

We  need  not  wait,  then,  we  must  not  wait, 
until  the  very  eve  of  our  entrance  into 
Heaven  to  make  ready  our  holier  selves. 
For  the  earnest  of  them  and  the  seed  of  them 
rnu^t  be  within  our  hearts  each  hour,  grow- 
ing greater,  sinking  deeper  day  by  day. 
Indeed,  if  we  are  prudent  and  reasonable 
men  our  whole  business  in  this  world,  and 
the  most  serious  and  steady  purpose  of  our 
lives,  must  always  be,  by  serving  and  loving 
God,  to  gather  more  and  more  of  that 
Sanctifying  Grace,  which  shall  bloom  out  so 
gloriously  in  us  under  the  sunshine  of 
Heaven.  In  our  brief  little  lives  it  must  all 
be  gathered  and  garnered.  With  the  sum- 
mons of  death  our  profitable  toils  are  at  an 
end  forever.  All  the  love  and  praise  of  all 
the  Saints  in  Heaven  cannot  add  one  iota  of 
glory  to  any  soul  that  has  passed  the  gates 
of  death. 

There  is  another  way  besides  this  in  which 
we  must  be  solicitous  for  our  holier  selves, 
even  while  we  are  here  on  earth  far  off  from 
our  heavenly  country.  With  care  and  prayer 
and  effort,  we  may  show  forth  those  holier 
selves  of  ours  even  in  our  earthly  lives.  We 
often  speak  of  our  better  self,  of  listening  to 
our  better  self,  and  following  our  better  self, 
1-39 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

and  letting  our  better  self  get  uppermost  in 
our  acts  and  thoughts.  Now  our  better  self 
on  earth  is  the  foreshadowing  and  promise 
of  our  better  self  in  Heaven. 

It  is  told  of  St.  Catharine  of  Siena 
that  her  countenance  sometimes  wonderfully 
changed  and  took  on  the  evident  likeness  of 
the  face  of  Christ.  What  happened  to  the 
countenance  of  the  holy  virgin  was  type  and 
figure  of  what  may  happen  to  our  own  souls 
and  lives,  if  we  are  faithful  in  listening  to 
and  striving  with  the  secret  whisperings  of 
the  grace  of  God.  Little  by  little,  struggle 
by  struggle,  trial  after  trial  will  bring  our 
better  and  our  holier  selves  uppermost  in  us, 
and  mould  us  slowly  but  surely  into  the  very 
likeness  of  Christ.  Meantime,  every  holy 
act  and  thought  and  word  will  heap  up  great 
treasures  of  the  seed  of  glory  within  us. 
Little  by  little  it  must  be  done,  day  by  day 
we  must  bring  forth  the  better  self  within, 
but  the  end  is  no  little  thing.  All  those  acts 
of  self-restraint  and  self-denial  which  give 
our  better  self  the  victory,  will  form  in  us 
holy  habits,  strong  and  fair,  until  the  counte- 
nance of  our  soul  is  moulded  into  the  seeming 
of  the  soul  of  Christ  even  here  on  earth,  as 
it  must  be  in  Heaven. 

140 


Our  Holier  Selves 

After  these  reflections,  it  is  not  hard  to 
see  why  Easter,  the  feast  of  the  Promise  of 
our  Resurrection,  should  bring  with  it  the 
strengthening  and  confirming  of  our  every 
holy  purpose  and  good  resolve.  Now  we 
must  pray  and  labor  and  weep,  sowing  the 
seed,  against  the  morning  of  that  eternal 
Easter  Day,  so  that  when  we  rise  again  from 
the  dead,  it  may  be  a  rising  with  Christ  our 
Lord  into  surpassing  glory,  clad  for  all  ages 
of  ages  in  our  due  beauty,  dignity  and  power, 
in  all  the  fulness  and  the  splendor  of  our 
holier  selves. 


141 


THE  BURNING  QUESTION 

THERE  is  a  time  of  year  when  the  closing 
of  the  schoolday  life  brings  before  the 
mind  of  many  a  youth  and  maiden  the  old. 
old  question  which  has  perplexed,  each  in  its 
turn,  all  rising  generations:  "What  shall  1 
do  in  the  world?"  Time  was  in  our  land, 
when  the  choice  of  a  way  of  life  was  simpler 
than  now.  The  world  had  not  grown  so 
varied  and  delightful  and  men  chose  more 
soberly  and  calmly,  and  often  with  an  anxious 
eye  to  the  life  to  come.  Now  the  richness 
and  complexity  of  modern  days  have  placed 
so  many  goods  and  trinkets  in  the  world's 
great  Vanity  Fair  that  it  is  hard  to  turn  our 
eyes  from  them  to  look  towards  Heaven  at  all. 

"Shall  it  be  wealth,  or' fame,  or  love,  or 
lettered  ease?  Shall  I  choose  pleasant  rural 
haunts,  with  freedom  from  the  crowd,  or 
plunge  into  city  throngs?"  So  the  young 
adventurer,  half  distracted,  half  delighted, 
counts  his  opportunities  and  talents,  and 
chooses  hopefully,  dreaming  meanwhile  such 
golden,  golden  dreams. 

But  the  great,  turbid  current  of  the  world 
keeps  on  its  wonted  way.  It  buffets  each 
142 


The  Burning  Question 

newcomer  as  lustily  as  the  last,  cools  and 
drenches  his  feverish  expectation,  and  flings 
him  aside  at  length  into  some  quiet  eddy  of 
old  age,  if  he  endures  so  far,  to  ponder,  oh, 
so  differently,  on  the  green,  foolish  fancies 
of  his  departed  youth. 

This  bright  intoxication  of  youthful  hopes, 
and  the  disillusionment  that  comes  with  age, 
have  been  the  pleasant  sport  of  wits  and 
moralists  time  out  of  mind ;  but  when  one 
dwells  on  the  pain  and  loss  and  sorrow  that 
this  foolish  grasping  after  worldly  goods  has 
caused,  amusement  changes  quickly  to  anxiety 
and  grief.  What  a  pity !  What  a  tragic  and 
terrible  pity,  to  risk  all  and  struggle  so  much 
for  this  little,  sorrowful  dying-space  which 
we  call  life,  and  to  forget  and  neglect  the 
full,  eternal,  glorious  life  which  is  to  be 
hereafter. 

Dear  young  adventurers,  pausing  on  the 
threshold  of  life  and  face  to  face  with  this 
fateful  question  of  your  true  vocation,  do 
not  follow,  as  fools  do,  the  easy  counsels  of 
the  world.  Do  not  ask  yourselves:  "What 
shall  I  buy  in  Vanity  Fair?"  but  ask:  "What 
is  my  vocation  ?  What  noble  and  precious 
work  does  God  intend  me  to  do  for  Him  as 
He  sends  me  out  into  the  world?"  Then, 
143 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

whatever  answer  your  true  heart  gives  you, 
follow  it  manfully.  "Choose  the  noblest  way 
of  life,  however  hard,"  was  the  counsel  of 
Pythagoras  to  his  disciples,  "for  by  use  and 
habit  even  the  hard  things  will  become  easy 
and  sweet." 

What  bright  fields  of  possible  endeavor 
stretch  wide  and  fair  before  your  hesitating 
feet.  There  is  the  religious  life  of  poverty, 
chastity  and  obedience;  a  truly  angelic  state, 
wherein  a  man  comes  most  near  to  Jesus 
Christ.  Kings,  like  St.  Louis,  have  wept  for 
this  holy  calling;  saintly  Popes  and  Bishops 
have  grieved  when  summoned  to  their  dig- 
nities, and  have  eagerly  returned  to  their 
humble  cells,  so  soon  as  God's  glory  and 
souls'  good  would  allow.  Moreover,  this 
most  noble  way  of  life,  like  so  many  of  God's 
greatest  gifts,  opens  to  poor  and  lowly  as  to 
the  rich  and  great,  to  simple  as  to  wise.  The 
humble  lay  brothers  and  sisters  are  welcomed 
with  no  less  charity  and  joy  than  is  the 
scholar  and  the  sage.  Here  men  live  lives 
most  nearly  like  the  angels'.  Search  your 
soul,  therefore,  earnestly,  lest  you  should  lose 
so  priceless  a  vocation.  Oh,  the  madness  of 
those  who  neglect  a  religious  calling !  the 
cruel,  mistaken  fondness  of  parents  and 
144 


The  Burning  Question 

friends  who  dare  to  interfere  with  God's 
designs  on  His  chosen  ones,  out  of  flimsy 
pretexts,  sprung  from  selfish  love  or  worldly 
hopes ! 

Then  there  is  the  glorious  and  amazing 
dignity  of  God's  holy  priesthood,  "a  priest 
forever,  according  to  the  order  of  Melchise- 
dech,"  standing  daily  to  lift  to  God  the 
Eternal  Sacrifice,  fed  at  the  Table  which  the 
Seraphs  envy,  father  and  ruler  of  the  people 
of  God!  How  is  it  that  our  young  men  so 
lightly  overlook  the  priesthood  when  their 
eager  hearts  are  dreaming  of  honor  and 
power  and  achievement?  Is  any  earthly 
dignity  like  this?  Is  any  power  like  this 
power  to  call  the  eternal  God  from  His  high 
throne,  to  bind  and  loose  the  very  souls  of 
men?  If  to  do  good  to  our  fellow  be  our 
desire,  who  has  so  direct  and  grave  a  mission 
to  save  and  help  his  kind  as  has  the  priest? 
Finally,  as  to  the  glories  of  the  world  to 
come,  we  have  God's  own  word  for  it,  that 
they  who  instruct  others  unto  justice  shall 
shine  like  stars  in  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven. 

All  are  not  called  to  such  amazing  dignities, 

and  for  such  as  are  not  there  open  out  the 

various  worthy  callings  of  the  world  wherein 

to  serve  God  nobly  and  aid  their  fellow-men. 

145 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Are  we  to  choose  even  here  according  to  our 
freakish  fancy,  or  from  vain  desire  of  wealth 
or  pleasure  or  fame  or  ease?  God,  since  He 
is  all-wise  and  all-provident,  must  have 
designed  each  of  us  for  some  special  work 
and  given  us  talents  and  graces  apt  for  that 
definite  end.  Our  character,  our  gifts,  above 
all,  the  still,  small  whispers  of  His  inspira- 
tion, duly  weighed  with  holy  counsel,  must 
point  us  out  His  will.  "How  can  I  best  honor 
God,  serve  my  fellow,  save  my  soul?"  this 
is  the  proper  question;  not  "how  can  I  live 
the  easiest  life  or  have  the  keenest  pleasure, 
or  gather  the  richest  gear?" 

How  much  depends  on  one's  first  choice  in 
life!  What  fearful  hazards  lie  about  those 
earliest  steps!  Never  trust  that  you  may 
experiment  and  try  again.  Never  hope  to 
venture  rashly  among  the  maddening  pleas- 
ures of  the  world  and  yet  come  off  safely, 
somehow,  after  all.  It  is  a  fateful  and  crucial 
time,  this  entrance  into  life,  to  which  your 
eager  hopes  strain  on  so  fast,  and  gravely 
and  earnestly  must  you  prepare  for  it.  Pray 
well,  think  deeply,  take  counsel  with  a  wise 
confessor,  go  often  to  the  Sacraments,  choose 
as  you  think  you  will  wish  to  have  chosen 
when  you  must  come  to  die. 
146 


LAYMEN'S  RETREATS 

•  HE  movement  for  laymen's  retreats, 
which  has  wrought  and  is  working 
still  such  wonders  in  Europe,  has  come  over 
the  water.  It  is  making  its  way,  gradually 
but  surely,  across  the  face  of  America,  and 
already  we  hear  great  tilings  of  the  interest 
these  retreats  are  arousing,  of  the  growing 
numbers  that  attend  them,  and  their  precious 
and  lasting  fruit. 

The  idea  of  retreats,  even  of  retreats  for 
laymen,  is  of  course  not  by  any  means  new. 
Not  to  speak  of  older  days,  it  is  now  more 
than  three  hundred  years  since  St.  Ignatius, 
by  an  unquestionable  inspiration  from  on  high, 
composed  his  method  of  Spiritual  Exercises. 
It  is  an  old  story  how  he  and  his  children 
after  him  gave  these  exercises  with  such  fruit 
to  all  classes  of  persons,  that  the  Jesuits 
were  accused  of  witchcraft  and  of  using 
magic  to  change  so  suddenly  the  characters 
and  souls  of  men.  Since  St.  Ignatius'  time 
the  yearly  retreat  has  come  to  be  the  very 
marrow  of  the  spiritual  life  in  all  communi- 
ties of  religious,  and  at  most  Jesuit  Novitiates 
some  rooms  are  set  aside  for  those  men  who 
147 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

may  wish  to  come,  singly  or  in  twos  or  threes, 
to  go  through  the  exercises  of  a  private 
retreat.  But  the  undertaking  of  which  we 
speak  is  something  over  and  above  all  this. 
It  has  the  vigor  and  impetus  of  a  new  and 
individual  enterprise.  It  is  organized,  wide- 
spread and  energetic.  It  embraces  large  and 
definite  bodies  of  all  kinds  and  conditions  of 
folk. 

The  movement  in  its  present  form  has  been 
growing  and  gaining  head  in  the  Old  World 
for  nearly  forty  years.  It  rose  very  obscurely 
in  Belgium  about  the  year  1865,  and  was  at 
first  confined  to  a  narrow  sphere.  From 
those  lowly  beginnings  the  work  has  pros- 
pered and  spread  until  at  the  present  time  it 
has  gone  far  and  wide  over  Europe,  and 
even  into  the  distant  colonies.  It  is  so  well 
established  that  there  are  now  more  than  one 
hundred  Houses  of  Retreats  for  men,  and 
those  for  women  are  even  more  numerous. 
Most  of  these  are  exclusively  given  over  to 
the  work,  and  some  of  them  afford  accom- 
modations for  a  surprising  number  of  retreat- 
ants.  In  Belgium  alone  there  are  twenty-two 
buildings  devoted  to  this  purpose,  almost  all 
of  them  in  the  vicinity  of  great  industrial 
centres  where  it  is  possible  to  gather  rich  and 
148 


Laymen's  Retreats 

poor  alike  without  compelling  them  to  be 
long  away  from  their  business  or  trade. 
Over  a  hundred  thousand  men  of  both  the 
working  and  employing  classes  have  made  a 
three  days'  retreat  in  these  houses  since  their 
establishment,  and  the  number  of  women 
who  have  made  retreats  is  still  greater.  Some 
of  the  other  countries  of  Europe  are  not  far 
behind.  In  Germany,  for  example,  the  num- 
ber of  retreats  annually  made  by  men  is 
said  to  equal  the  yearly  count  in  Belgium. 
In  France,  Austria,  Italy,  Spain,  Holland, 
Switzerland,  the  work  is  at  a  notable  stage 
of  development,  and  it  has  been  begun  in 
England,  Ireland,  Denmark,  and  even  as  far 
abroad  as  British  India,  Ceylon,  China  and 
Madagascar. 

Among  our  neighbors  of  South  America, 
too,  the  work  goes  on  apace.  Mexico  has  no 
less  than  three  houses  of  retreat.  In  Santiago 
de  Chili,  we  have  been  told,  more  than  two 
hundred  thousand  souls  have  gone  through 
the  Exercises  in  the  last  ten  years.  In 
Colombia,  forty-four  thousand  private  retreats 
were  counted  in  two  years.  Everywhere 
great  results  are  found  to  follow.  In  Canada, 
too,  the  work  of  retreats  is  being  pushed  for- 
ward with  energy  and  success. 
149 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Beside  many  of  the  retreat  houses,  societies 
of  laymen  have  arisen  to  promote  the  move- 
ment and  perpetuate  its  fruits.  These 
societies  band  together  the  erstwhile  retreat- 
ants  for  mutual  encouragement  in  their  good 
resolves ;  they  collect  funds  to  build  new 
houses,  organize  bands  of  retreatants,  distrib- 
ute literature  bearing  upon  the  work,  and 
even  pay  the  wages  of  those  workingmen 
whose  families  would  otherwise  suffer  by 
their  absence  from  their  daily  toil.  Generous 
contributions  to  this  latter  end  are  also  made 
by  some  employers,  even  non-Catholic  ones, 
who  realize  the  benefit  to  their  interests  which 
comes  from  the  good  influence  of  a  retreat 
upon  their  workmen,  and  the  antidote  a  good 
retreat  affords  against  the  dreaded  plague  of 
Socialism. 

In  the  United  States  the  movement  is  still 
in  its  infancy,  but  it  is  a  vigorous  and  thriv- 
ing infancy,  promising  noble  growth.  When 
our  people  awake  to  the  immense  power  for 
good  which  these  retreats  can  exercise  among 
them  they  will  not  fail  to  lend  their  enthu- 
siastic support.  The  unity,  fervor  and  zeal 
which  we  cry  out  for  in  greater  measure 
among  our  Catholic  laity,  the  interest  in 
social  work  and  in  the  cause  of  Christian 
150 


Laymen's  Retreats 

charity,  which  modern  conditions  more  and 
more  demand  of  us,  and  the  solid  faith  and 
devotion  which  these  unbelieving  times 
require,  are  nowhere  to  be  found  in  fuller 
measure.  The  antidote  for  modern  fallacies 
and  for  the  poison  of  Socialism,  Rationalism, 
Liberalism — all  the  venomous  swarm  of  'isms 
which  the  stagnant  pools  of  materialistic 
thought  have  bred  upon  us — awaits  us,  too, 
where  our  brothers  of  Europe  have  found  it, 
behind  the  quiet  walls  of  houses  of  retreats. 
In  New  York  City  the  work  has  been  on 
foot  for  several  years  and  is  reaching  notable 
proportions.  At  St.  Mary's  College,  Kansas, 
an  annual  retreat  was  inaugurated  some  years 
ago,  and  the  movement  grows  from  year  to 
year.  At  Santa  Clara  College,  California, 
the  work  has  been  going  on  for  a  number  of 
years  and  four  retreats  are  given  there  every 
year.  The  Fathers  of  the  Divine  Word  at 
Techny,  111.,  are  also  carrying  on  laymen's 
retreats  with  gratifying  fruit.  At  Brooklyn, 
near  Cleveland,  O.,  and  at  Florissant,  Mo., 
retreats  have  long  been  given  to  individuals 
and  small  groups  of  men.  The  Sacred  Heart 
College  of  Prairie  du  Chien,  Wis.,  has  like- 
wise begun  the  work  of  retreats,  and  in  the 
South  the  new  College  of  St.  Charles,  at 
151 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Grand  Coteau,  La.,  has  been  turned  into  a 
house  of  retreats  for  laymen,  during  the  sum- 
mer months,  at  the  request  of  many  Catholic 
citizens. 

What  we  may  hope  from  these  good  begin- 
nings one  may  judge  by  studying  the  move- 
ment at  its  fullest  stage  of  development  in 
the  countries  of  Europe.  There  are  special 
buildings,  built  with  a  view  to  the  retreatants' 
needs,  roomy,  pleasant  and  secluded,  and 
usually  in  the  country  or  on  the  outskirts  of 
some  quiet  town.  To  these  come  continually 
bands  of  men  from  city  and  countryside,  all 
manner  of  men :  some  of  them  fervent  and 
exemplary,  some,  it  may  be,  on  the  verge  of 
making  shipwreck  of  their  faith ;  wise  men 
and  unlearned  (for  not  the  least  hopeful  ele- 
ment in  this  work  is  its  universal  and  demo- 
cratic appeal)  ;  "gentlemen,"  as  one  list  has 
it,  "farmers,  youths,  commercial  employees, 
workmen,  students,  seminarists,  recruits  and 
conscripts,  professors,  brothers  of  religious 
orders,  priests !"  In  bands  of  from  twenty 
to  a  hundred  they  go  through  the  exercises 
of  the  retreat,  pondering  seriously  the  great 
and  fundamental  truths,  weighing  and  squar- 
ing their  daily  lives  to  the  measure  of  the 
Faith  that  is  in  them,  putting  in  order  the 
152 


r 


Christ  Praying  with  His  Disciples 


Laymen's  Retreats 

things  of  time  and  providing  duly  for  the 
all-important  issues  of  death  and  of  eternity. 

Then  they  go  forth  again  to  their  homes, 
to  the  office,  or  shop  or  factory,  and  here  the 
true  work  of  the  retreat  and  its  efficacy  are 
seen  in  their  lives.  They  are  changed  men. 
They  have  seen  a  vision,  and  the  world  does 
not  look  quite  the  same  afterwards.  It  is  a 
holier  place  and  a  happier,  and  they  have  a 
charm  against  its  evils  and  a  clue  to  its  snares 
and  its  confusions.  The  delusions  of  the 
world  and  the  devil  and  the  flesh  are  fallen 
from  them,  they  have  a  balm  against  their 
old  soreness  and  discontent.  Socialism  and 
Rationalism  and  Liberalism  can  no  more 
deceive  them,  while  they  hold  clear  the  holy 
reflections  and  the  strong  convictions  gained 
during  the  ponderings  of  their  retreat.  In  a 
word,  they  have  been  "oriented,"  their  hearts 
are  set  right  and  they  come  soberly  yet  joy- 
fully to  make  a  new  start  in  life. 

These  men,  filled  with  a  new  spirit  and  a 
keener  realization  of  their  faith,  are  not  con- 
tent with  their  personal  betterment  alone. 
They  have  caught  a  livelier  zeal,  they  wish 
to  become  apostles.  Henceforth  the  move- 
ment finds  in  them  its  sturdiest  supporters 
and  most  eager  advocates.  Their  own  experi- 
153 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

ence  guides  them  in  the  work,  a  very  impor- 
tant one,  of  inducing  others  to  come  and 
make  retreats. 

It  must  be  confessed  that  many  men  at 
first  look  upon  the  proposal  that  they  should 
spend  three  whole  days  in  meditation  and 
prayer  with  a  feeling  of  uncertainty  and 
strangeness,  not  unmixed  with  apprehension. 
They  look  upon  it  as  an  odd  experiment,  to 
say  the  least,  and  dread  not  a  little  the  idea 
of  spending  so  long  a  time  in  silence  and  in 
thought.  It  is  interesting  to  notice  the  change 
in  their  attitude  when  one  speaks  to  them 
after  the  exercises  are  over.  Those  three 
days  were  the  happiest,  the  most  interesting, 
the  most  profitably  spent  in  all  their  experi- 
ence. It  was  not  so  much  that  the  matter 
presented  to  them  was  new — much  of  it  after 
all  they  had  known  from  their  catechism  days 
— but  the  method,  the  clear,  strong,  logical 
development  of  meditation  after  meditation, 
the  atmosphere  of  retirement  and  peace,  the 
encouragement  of  their  companions,  not  least 
the  catching  enthusiasm  of  their  director,  all 
these  made  the  good  old  truths  shine  clearer, 
glow  warmer,  burn  deeper  into  the  soul. 
Instead  of  dreading  the  ordeal  now,  many 
of  them  are  concerned  already  about  arrang- 
154 


Laymen's  Retreats 

ing  for  its  repetition,  and  make  joyful  prep- 
aration to  return  each  year  for  three  days 
more  of  this  attractive  and  effective  cure  for 
souls. 

When  we  seek  to  explain  to  ourselves  the 
real  nature  of  the  Spiritual  Exercises,  it  would 
be  hard  perhaps  to  find  a  better  brief  charac- 
terization of  the  work  than  this :  that  it  is 
in  very  truth  a  skilful  and  effective  cure  of 
souls.  We  all  of  us  know  that  the  rush  and 
struggle  of  modern  life  goes  hard  with  the 
body  and  the  mind.  Perhaps  we  do  not  so 
often  pause  to  think  that  they  are  wearing 
and  trying  too  upon  the  strength  and  purity 
of  the  immortal  soul.  It  stands  to  reason 
that  just  as  the  feverish  excesses  of  the 
present  time  cause  men  constantly  to  suffer 
from  brain-fag  and  nerve-fag,  and  drive  them 
into  breakdowns  and  collapses,  so  those  very 
same  excesses  and  distractions,  the  same 
headlong  chase  after  amusement  and  pleas- 
ure, make  the  poor  soul  suffer  and  grow  ailing 
too.  True,  the  soul  cannot  give  such  sharp 
warning  of  its  illness  as  the  body  does.  It 
may  be  perishing,  or  already  dead  with  sin, 
and  no  headaches  rack  us,  we  feel  no  keen 
and  bodily  distress.  But  whether  we  are 
conscious  of  it  or  not,  just  as  the  clang  and 
155 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

clatter  of  city  streets  jar  our  nerves,  and  its 
smoke  and  dust  soil  our  faces  and  hands  as 
we  pass,  so  our  souls  are  hurt  and  jarred 
with  the  many  noisy  distractions,  and  soiled 
by  the  murky  spiritual  atmosphere  of  the 
world  in  which  we  are  forced  to  live. 

Now,  when  the  body  craves  for  repose  and 
change  of  scene  there  are  broad,  quiet  coun- 
try places,  cheerful  sanitariums,  or  camps  in 
the  mountains,  or  houses  by  the  sea,  to  nurse 
our  feverish  bodies  to  health  again,  and  heal 
the  jarred  nerves  and  calm  the  whirling  brain. 
So,  one  may  truly  say,  the  House  of  Retreats, 
quiet,  pleasant  and  secluded,  is  a  place  of 
calm  and  cure  for  the  strained,  distracted 
soul. 

This  spiritual  rest  is,  however,  only  one 
side  of  the  retreats ;  for  if  our  body  craves 
healthful  exercise  to  vary  its  repose,  still 
more  does  our  fiery  and  restless  spirit.  So 
there  is  another  aspect  to  these  retreats  which 
gives  them  their  other  name,  the  Spiritual 
Exercises.  "Spiritual  Exercises" — the  words 
explain  themselves,  for  what  is  it  to  exercise 
our  spirit,  but  to  work  with  the  three  great 
powers  of  the  soul,  the  memory,  intellect  and 
will?  To  work  with  prayer  and  reflection 
and  reasoning  and  strong  resolve — for  this 
156 


Laymen's  Retreats 

we  enter  into  retreat — to  realize  the  true 
meaning  of  life,  the  purpose  of  God  in  placing 
us  in  this  world,  the  use  of  the  creatures  He 
has  set  about  us,  the  destiny  we  must  aim 
at  and  the  means  by  which  that  destiny  may 
be  best  attained,  and  to  work  also  in  taking 
measures  and  forming  resolves,  to  carry  this 
realization  deep  into  our  lives. 

But  the  mere  clamor  and  distraction  of  our 
daily  life  are  not  always  its  worst  peril  to 
ourselves.  There  are  positive  dangers,  and 
there  are  aggressive  enemies.  False  theories 
of  religion  and  morals  are  abroad,  which 
almost  without  our  knowing  it  poison  our 
thoughts,  pervert  our  ideals,  and  weaken  the 
divine  health  and  vigor  of  the  faith  within 
us.  Indifference  in  matters  of  belief,  a  toler- 
ance of  false  ideals  of  family  life,  loose 
morals,  vile  and  insidious  literature,  false 
standards  of  honesty  in  business,  political  cor- 
ruption, an  impatience  of  authority,  Socialism, 
a  false  Liberalism — the  enumeration  of  mod- 
ern errors  and  perils  reads  like  a  catalogue 
of  sub-divisions  of  the  Deadly  Sins! 

As    a    protective    from    this    miasma,    this 

vaporous   poison   which   rises    from   the  low 

places   of  the   world,   it  is  well   at  times  to 

climb  to  clearer  and  holier  heights,  and  fill 

157 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

one's  lungs  with  some  saving  breaths  of 
unpolluted  air.  It  is  well  to  dwell  a  while 
on  the  pure  truths  and  unselfish  principles  of 
Holy  Faith,  which  are  a  medicine  and  an 
antidote  against  these  evils.  It  is  this  oppor- 
tunity which  retreats  for  laymen  offer  to 
Catholic  men  who  are  in  the  world. 

Finally,  one  must  not  confuse  the  idea  of 
a  mission,  with  which  we  are  so  familiar,  with 
that  of  a  retreat.  Good  and  helpful  as  mis- 
sions are,  these  retreats  for  the  individual 
mean  something  more.  The  very  words 
suggest  the  difference.  For  a  "mission" 
means  a  sending.  God's  messenger  is  sent 
to  us  to  exhort  and  to  arouse  us.  We  come 
together  for  a  while  each  day  to  hear  his 
instruction  and  to  pray,  and  then  we  per- 
force go  home  or  about  our  business,  so  that 
we  are  in  great  danger  of  growing  distracted 
and  even  perhaps  of  forgetting,  in  other  cares, 
the  holy  message  we  have  heard.  But  in  a 
retreat  we  ourselves  retire  from  the  din  and 
bustle  of  our  daily  lives  to  give  ourselves 
entirely,  without  distraction,  to  intimate  con- 
verse with  our  Creator.  We  arise  from  our 
daily  tasks  and  go  apart  to  God.  Not  that 
a  retreat  is  a  lonely  experience,  for  there  are 
many  together  and  we  profit  by  companion- 
158 


Laymen's  Retreats 

ship  and  good  example.  But  we  keep  much 
to  ourselves  and  very  near  to  God. 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  the  Holy  Father, 
in  common  with  zealous  Churchmen  and  far- 
seeing  Catholics  of  every  state,  has  given  his 
earnest  and  repeated  encouragement  to  so 
apostolic  a  work.  It  is,  as  he  has  said  (in  a 
letter  to  the  director  of  one  of  the  European 
houses  of  retreats),  one  of  the  chief  means 
which  he  looks  to  for  the  fulfilling  of  his  holy 
purpose  "to  make  all  things  new  in  Christ." 
And  on  another  occasion  he  declared  even 
more  definitely  and  strongly:  "I  wish  to  be 
the  Pope  of  retreats." 

We  Catholics  of  America  cannot  do  better 
then,  than  further  this  earnest  wish  of  the 
Sovereign  Pontiff  by  the  offering  of  our  good 
works  and  prayers.  Nor  need  we  pause  at 
good  desires  alone.  There  are  many  ways 
of  actively  aiding  the  work.  To  go  oneself 
to  one  of  the  centres  already  established,  or 
to  persuade  another  to  go  there  and  enter 
upon  a  retreat ;  to  offer  contributions  to  these 
centres  in  aid  of  the  building  of  houses  for 
this  special  purpose,  to  contribute,  as  is  done 
in  Europe,  to  pay  the  wages  of  workingmen 
while  they  are  in  retreat,  to  organize  bands 
of  retreatants  and  spread  the  knowledge  of 
159 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

the  movement  even  to  those  outside  the  faith 
(for  a  belief  in  the  fundamental  doctrines  of 
Christianity  is  all  that  is  required  to  make  the 
retreat  useful  even  to  a  zealous  Protestant), 
these  are  some  of  the  many  ways  which  open 
up  before  the  individual's  zeal.  If  one  aids 
the  work  now  in  its  infancy,  he  will  feel  a 
noble  pride  when  in  God's  providence  houses 
for  retreats  are  spread  throughout  the  land; 
like  so  many  fortresses  of  Christian  zeal  and 
virtue,  or  rather  like  other  cenacles  where  the 
Holy  Spirit  descends  to  kindle  and  inflame 
the  hearts  of  men. 


160 


A  COMMONPLACE  WONDER 

W  AST  night  I  was  present  at  the  ending 
JLv  of  the  three  days'  retreat  of  a  Young 
Men's  Sodality.  A  very  commonplace  occa- 
sion. But  it  was  the  memory  of  the  circular 
of  a  great  non-Catholic  proselytizing  society, 
read  not  long  before,  that  cast  for  us  a  mys- 
tical and  tender  glory  about  the  ending  of 
that  retreat. 

The  circular  had  been  sadly  eloquent  of 
what  "they"  are  doing,  and  we,  it  seems,  find 
it  so  hard  to  do.  There  were  tales  of  great 
gymnasia,  and  reading  rooms  in  crowded 
cities,  and  halls  in  lonely  villages;  of  railroad 
libraries  and  sailors'  rests  in  home  and 
foreign  ports.  There  were  lists  of  lecture 
courses,  and  Bible  classes ;  and  figures  which 
dealt  with  brick  and  stone  and  money  and 
games  and  books.  And  to  be  sure,  the  ques- 
tion rose  in  our  mind,  as  it  has  in  many  minds 
before:  Why  cannot  we,  with  our  faith, 
with  our  clear  vision  of  the  need,  with  our 
sorrow  for  perverse  proselytizing,  and  zeal 
for  conversions  to  the  one  true  Faith,  why 
cannot  we  make  such  boasts  as  these? 

Some  hours  later  I  stood  in  the  rear  of  a 
161 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

Sodality  Hall  and  listened  to  the  closing 
words  of  the  retreat.  There,  crowded 
together  on  the  not  luxurious  benches, 
listened  a  throng  of  men  various  in  nearly 
every  respect,  but  they  all  were  Catholics 
and  earnest  souls.  No  social  pleasure  nor 
fine  equipment,  nor  sports  nor  books  helped 
at  all  to  gather  them  together  for  these  three 
days  of  thought  and  prayer.  But  they  had 
been  coming  in  just  such  throngs  from  office 
and  store,  and  workshop  and  factory,  to  listen 
to  the  soberest  truths  of  Faith,  Death,  Judg- 
ment, Hell  and  Heaven.  And  they  listened 
humbly,  piously,  with  honest  and  reverent 
eyes. 

After  this  last  instruction  there  was  to  be 
an  admission  of  candidates,  and  a  crowd  of 
young  men,  bright-eyed,  vigorous  fellows, 
knelt  at  the  railing  and  recited  a  simple  Act 
of  Consecration,  and  were  given  the  medal  of 
the  Sodality.  What  did  that  mean?  That 
these  young  men,  with  the  flush  of  their  hot 
youth  in  them,  and  the  spell  of  the  world  all 
about  them,  were  joining  a  society  which  aims 
first  and  almost  exclusively  at  unearthly 
things.  They  were  pledging  themselves  to 
monthly  Communion,  with  all  that  means  of 
a  steady  will  and  strong  pursuit  of  heavenly- 
162 


A  Commonplace  Wonder 

mindedness.  They  were  promising  to  try 
and  keep  their  hearts  as  clean  and  their  lives 
as  innocent  as  becomes  the  sworn  sons  of  a 
stainless  Mother,  who  is  crowned  Queen  of 
all  Virgins,  here  and  in  the  Heavens. 

Then  my  reverie  grew,  and  I  saw  in  that 
self-same  city  other  such  sodalities,  each 
with  the  same  bright,  unearthly  aim,  the 
same  more  than  natural  promises,  and  the 
same  various  membership  of  energetic,  hot- 
blooded  men,  exposed  every  day  and  hour 
to  the  full  blast  and  flame  of  this  world's 
wickedness.  Then  I  saw  sodalities  in  other 
cities,  other  countries,  other  continents !  The 
strangeness,  the  superhuman  strangeness  and 
beauty  of  it  all  dawned  slowly  upon  me,  from 
the  commonplace  forms  and  work-a-day  sur- 
roundings. These  men  move  in  a  world 
which  sneers  at  unworldliness,  smiles  at 
simple  faith  and  yearns  for  the  sensible  and 
the  delightful,  for  what  it  can  touch  and 
grasp  and  see.  Yet  they  are  not  moved  to 
their  hard  and  pure  allegiance  to  the  Queen 
of  Heaven  by  much  present  gain  or  genial 
fellowship,  or  bright  assembly  rooms,  or 
social  gatherings.  They  like  all  these  things 

and  have  them,  in  some  measure,  and  it  is 
very  desirable  no  doubt  that  they  should 

163 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

have  them  more  and  more.  But  the  beauty 
and  glory  of  their  fellowship  lies  just  in  this : 
that  it  is  independent  of  all  temporal  gain, 
an  unpurchased  fealty,  a  supernatural  service 
— surely  a  high  and  holy  and  a  strange 
phenomenon  in  this  sadducean  world. 

I  lifted  my  head.  The  bricks  and  stones 
and  books  and  games — good  and  worthy  helps 
though  they  are — did  not  shine  quite  so 
brightly  now,  beside  the  glory  of  those  many 
forms  bowed  at  the  shrine  of  Mary.  A  touch 
of  true  unworldliness — this  after  all  is  rare 
and  wonderful  on  the  earth! 


164 


ONE  ASPECT  OF  OUR  PUBLIC 
LIBRARIES 

THOUGH  great  zeal  is  being  shown  here 
and  there,  the  question  still  remains  in 
general  most  pertinent:  "Why  do  not  we 
Catholics  make  more  use  of  the  public  libraries 
of  our  great  cities  to  spread  a  proper  knowl- 
edge of  the  truths  of  Holy  Faith?" 

If  one  thinks  a  moment,  the  opportunities 
they  offer  seem  singular  and  attractive  enough 
to  stir  the  zeal  of  the  coldest.  The  shelves 
of  our  great  libraries  are  open,  generally 
speaking,  to  any  sort  of  useful  and  interest- 
ing book,  be  its  theological  or  philosophic 
color  what  it  may.  Day  after  day,  the  keen- 
est, most  alert  and  eager  of  the  city's  students 
come  to  search  the  rows  of  books  and  the 
cards  of  the  catalogues  for  information  on 
all  manner  of  topics  —  history,  science, 
sociology,  letters,  art — all  the  wide  range  of 
subjects  in  which  atheism,  materialism,  and 
a  host  of  minor  'isms  wage  war  against 
Mother  Church.  While  they  find  the  non- 
Catholic  or  even  the  anti -religious  side  well 
stated  in  many  bulky  volumes,  they  too  often 
get  the  Catholic  view  only  in  the  half- 
165 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

comprehending  interpretations  of  its  sternest 
enemies. 

To  realize  what  a  great  loss  this  may  be 
to  the  interests  of  the  Faith,  you  need  only 
watch  the  earnestness  with  which  these 
seekers  after  information  pursue  their 
search.  Like  a  good  hound  on  the  scent, 
you  may  see  such  a  man  following  the  trail 
of  his  subject  through  all  the  devious  ways 
of  catalogues  and  shelves.  Indifferent  to  dust 
and  toil,  he  handles  volume  after  volume,  he 
fingers  indices,  he  hunts  through  files  of 
ancient  magazines,  he  spares  no  time  or 
pains  to  rummage  out  cross-reference  and 
quotation  which  may  help  him  to  swell  his 
essay  or  ornament  his  critique. 

Jew,  atheist  or  Christian  sage,  such  a  man 
will  read  any  author  duly  who  treats  of  his 
cherished  theme,  and  his  mind  is  often  too 
earnest  after  fact  not  to  spring  easily  beyond 
the  pales  of  bigotry;  too  thirsty  with  pursuit 
not  to  drink  up  any  honest  words  which 
promise  him  the  pleasant  flavor  of  the  truth. 

Now,  if  you  could  only  put  before  such  a 
man,  in  such  a  favorable  moment,  the  very 
book  he  needs  to  help  him  to  a  knowledge  of 
that  truth;  if  you  could  place  in  his  hands 
a  Catholic  author,  who  has  well  said  in  his 
166 


One  Aspect  of  Our  Public  Libraries 

earnest  pages  just  what  will  enlighten  and 
perhaps  persuade,  and  bring  the  Catholic 
doctrine  home,  would  you  not  think  it  worth 
a  great  deal  of  painstaking  and  toil?  Yet, 
the  thing  is  as  simple  as  day.  We  all  have 
the  means  constantly,  so  to  speak,  at  our  very 
elbow — you  need  only  go  to  the  library  and 
recommend  the  purchase  of  that  book. 

The  librarian  and  his  corps  of  assistants 
will  look  with  greater  or  less  interest  on 
your  suggestion,  according  as  they  think  the 
book  you  recommend  more  or  less  likely  to 
be  useful  and  welcome  to  the  public  they  seek 
to  serve.  In  many  cases,  if  past  experience 
may  be  relied  upon,  they  will  be  thankful  for 
the  suggestion  and  take  measures  to  procure 
the  volume  and  enroll  it  in  the  catalogue, 
cross-referencing  it  in  several  ways.  And 
thenceforth,  for  many  years,  your  patient 
messenger  will  stand  ready  to  offer  itself  to 
any  inquirer  on  the  subjects  with  which  it 
deals,  appealing  to  all  comers  without  weari- 
ness or  reserve,  doing  good  deeds  for  you 
long,  perhaps,  after  you  have  left  the  world. 

Here    one    might    pause    to    wonder    how 

very    few    distinctly    Catholic    books    appear 

among  the  gifts   to  our  great  city  libraries. 

Tn   many   of  our   Catholic   homes   there   are 

167 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

scores  of  excellent  works — honored  and  dis- 
used— which  gather  dust  from  year's  end  to 
year's  end  without  there  being  the  slightest 
prospect  in  their  present  surroundings  of 
their  ever  reaching  any  mortal  eye.  What 
an  excellent  idea  it  would  be  to  take  these 
volumes  to  some  library  which  is  open  to 
the  public,  where  they  would  be  honorably 
lodged,  catalogued  each  under  its  respective 
subjects,  and  put  in  the  way  of  enlightening 
many  minds!  We  are  all  coming  to  realize 
more  and  more  what  a  fruitful  and  noble 
work  of  charity  it  is  to  give  even  to  a  single 
individual  a  worthy  Catholic  book,  with  its 
wealth  of  possibilities  for  spiritual  good. 
Surely,  then,  to  offer  the  same  precious 
opportunity  to  a  whole  city,  to  the  most 
interested  and  most  influential  minds  of  a 
whole  community,  is  a  work  of  still  more 
admirable  zeal. 

Nor  should  we  fear  unduly  any  resentment 
or  resistance  on  the  part  of  the  library 
authorities  in  this  effort  of  ours  to  gain  a  fair 
representation  of  Catholic  books  upon  their 
shelves.  For  libraries  are  for  the  people — 
and  we  Catholics  often  form  the  majority  of 
readers.  Again,  libraries  are  for  information, 
and  on  what  topic  is  copious  and  accurate 
1G8 


One  Aspect  of  Our  Public  Libraries 

information  more  essential  than  on  the 
Catholic  Church, — the  greatest  religious 
fact  of  all  the  world. 

Viewed  in  this  light,  then,  the  apathetic 
attitude  of  many  even  among  our  more  highly 
educated  Catholics  toward  this  matter  of  intro- 
ducing Catholic  books  is  lamentable  indeed. 
Time  and  time  again  they  come  into  the 
libraries  seeking  information  on  points  of 
literature,  history,  science,  and  what  not, 
which  they  had  far  rather  gain  from  some 
writer  in  sympathy  with  their  own  traditions 
and  beliefs.  They,  too,  like  the  other  eager 
searchers,  run  through  the  catalogues,  and 
hunt  the  shelves,  and  find  the  same  elegant 
profusion  of  the  standard  works  of  free- 
thinker, Protestant  and  Jew,  with  only  here 
and  there  some  antiquated  volume  which 
bears  a  welcome  and  familiar  Catholic  name. 
And  so,  to  gain  the  information  they  wish, 
they  must  needs  choose  out  what  seems  the 
least  objectionable  work,  and  turn  over  its 
alien  pages  in  a  dissatisfied  sort  of  way,  trying 
to  make  proper  allowance  for  the  author's 
religious  bias,  and  to  pick  out  the  desired 
grain  of  information  from  the  mass  of 
mingled  error  and  truth. 

Then,  sad  to  say,  quite  oblivious  to  the 
169 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

suggestion  box  or  printed  suggestion  form 
which  is  provided  for  just  such  cases  as  this, 
the  disappointed  seeker  commonly  walks 
forth  in  some  disgust,  murmuring,  it  may  be. 
at  the  lack  of  Catholic  energy  and  spirit,  but 
never  dreaming  of  urging  his  common  right 
as  a  citizen,  and  of  providing  for  future 
Catholic  students  books  that  they  can  trust 
and  use.  Surely,  our  horizon  is  too  improvi- 
dently  narrow,  when,  in  such  a  case,  we  look 
only  to  our  own,  and  that,  too,  our  present 
need.  We  may  wish  to  consult  reliable  books 
on  these  same  topics  again — and  others  surely 
will. 

A  word  or  two  might  be  added  here  on  the 
special  opportunities  possessed  in  this  matter 
by  Catholic  teachers,  especially  of  the  higher 
classes.  They  often  have  occasion  to  give  to 
their  students  lists  of  references,  on  the 
matter  in  hand,  on  philosophy,  or  letters,  or 
history,  and  so  on  through  the  list,  which 
are  to  be  called  for  by  the  students  at  the 
public  library.  Of  course,  the  report  comes 
back  that  this  book  or  the  other  is  to  be  had, 
but  that  the  rest,  and  perhaps  the  ones  most 
valuable  as  references,  are  "not  in  the 
catalogue." 

Now,  what  could  be  more  natural  and 
170 


One  Aspect  of  Our  Public  Libraries 

proper  (and  will  some  one  add,  in  cynical 
parenthesis  "more  unusual")  than  that  the 
said  professor  should  write  to  the  librarian, 
mentioning  the  deficiency  he  has  discovered, 
stating  the  merit  of  the  work  desired,  and 
its  usefulness  in  his  own  classes,  and  asking 
that  it  be  procured?  Such  a  request  from 
such  a  source  would  carry  double  weight. 

We  have  now  run  over,  briefly  and  in  a 
cursory  way,  some  of  the  more  obvious  and 
easy  ways  in  which  Catholic  books  may  be 
introduced  in  proper  proportion  to  the  readers 
of  the  "public  libraries"  of  the  land.  With 
even  a  moderate  activity  along  these  lines, 
how  quickly  the  situation  would  improve! 

Once  the  book  is  safely  bought  and  cata- 
logued, one's  zeal  need  not  rest  there.  A 
word  to  this  one  or  that  who  is  interested 
in  the  subject  matter  will  give  the  work  a 
present  circulation,  so  that  one  good  deed 
may  bear  fruit  in  many  more.  This  sort  of 
work  might  well  be  introduced  among  the 
enterprises  of  Catholic  clubs  and  sodalities. 
If  we  were  to  accustom  our  children  to  take 
interest  in  such  things  we  would  not  hear  so 
many  complaints,  when  they  grow  older,  of 
their  indifference  toward  Catholic  literature. 

What  has  been  said  of  books  might  well  be 
171 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

repeated  of  Catholic  papers  and  magazines. 
It  is  quite  exasperating,  when  one  considers 
that  we  Catholics  form  so  large  a  part  of  the 
population  of  our  American  cities,  to  come 
into  the  reading-room  of  a  public  library, 
where  there  is  a  whole  host  of  publications 
of  every  stamp,  and  find,  perhaps,  but  a 
single  one  of  the  many  excellent  Catholic 
magazines  which  this  country  and  England 
now  afford.  Here  again  concerted  action  on 
the  part  of  Catholics  would  readily  procure 
a  fair  sprinkling  at  least  of  Catholic 
periodicals. 

Perhaps  at  this  point  some  one  may  be 
wondering:  "But  how  is  one  to  know  of 
these  good  Catholic  books?"  Not  a  very 
creditable  query,  surely,  considering  how  well 
informed  many  of  us  are  on  alien  publica- 
tions, but  a  very  practical  one,  and  therefore 
to  be  squarely  met.  Generally,  one  might 
answer:  "Take  an  especial  interest  in  the 
work  of  writers  of  your  own  faith,  glance 
now  and  then  through  the  catalogues  of 
Catholic  publishers,  who  are  yearly  adding 
some  valuable  new  works,  and  reprints  of 
older  ones,  to  their  lists ;  speak  on  the  subject 
with  others  better  informed  than  yourself, 
read  the  reviews  of  recent  books  in  Catholic 
172 


One  Aspect  of  Our  Public  Libraries 

magazines,  in  a  word,  use  all  the  means  one 
ordinarily  tries  to  gather  information  about 
books."  Doubtless,  when  you  have  finished 
your  search,  two  things  will  have  impressed 
you  deeply :  first,  the  goodly  number  of 
valuable  works  by  Catholic  authors  that  exist, 
and  then  your  surprising  slowness  in  not 
having  found  them  out  before. 

Now — to  close  with  a  somewhat  disagree- 
able admonition — perhaps  the  most  necessary 
caution  in  a  matter  of  this  kind  is  that  each 
one  should  look  on  the  duty  of  spreading  a 
knowledge  of  Catholic  books  as  personal  to 
himself,  and  not  pass  it  on,  mentally,  to  other 
hands.  This  habit  of  trusting  that  every  good 
work  of  the  kind  we  mention  may  be  some- 
how done  by  someone  else  is,  perhaps,  the 
most  distressing  element  of  the  listless  atti- 
tude taken  by  so  many  Catholics  on  urgent 
issues  of  the  day.  With  such  a  principle, 
how  is  there  any  hope  of  spreading  duly  our 
precious  message  of  the  truth?  It  is  only 
by  each  one's  doing  honestly  his  little  part 
that  the  grand  sum  of  noble  effort  which  God 
so  evidently  requires  of  the  Catholics  of  this 
generation  can  ever  worthily  be  paid. 

The  earnest  attempts  in  this  line,  made 
here  and  there  by  the  zealous,  may  result 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

very  well  in  their  own  limited  field  and  for 
a  certain  time,  but  it  is  only  when  educated 
Catholics  as  a  whole  awaken  from  their 
present  apathy  to  a  sense  of  individual  duty 
and  responsibility,  that  any  great  and  lasting 
good  will  be  achieved.  Surely  when  the 
forces  of  evil  show  such  fearless  zeal  and 
tireless  energy  in  spreading  far  and  wide 
their  false  and  dangerous  doctrines,  he  must 
be  a  paltry  soldier  of  Christ  who  will  not  do 
even  the  little  that  he  can  to  speed  to  the 
waiting  millions  the  sacred  message  of  our 
ancient  Faith. 


174 


A  SUMMER  OPPORTUNITY 

TPIE  idea  came  to  me  in  this  wise.  I 
was  surveying  with  deep  interest  from 
the  organ-loft  the  last  exercises  of  a  Chil- 
dren's Mission.  Truly  it  was  a  touching 
sight.  There  were  two  hundred  or  more 
little  heads  bobbing  in  the  benches,  the  girls 
to  the  left,  the  boys  to  the  right,  for  all  the 
world  like  lively  little  flowers. 

They  were  demure  and  interested,  too, 
and  when  two  or  three  little  buds  in  a 
secluded  spot  began  to  nod  rather  too  vio- 
lently, I  saw  one  of  the  older  lads  put  forth 
an  admonitory  arm  and  bring  them  back  to 
an  admired  meekness  and  propriety.  Good 
little  lads  and  lasses !  They  had  come,  some 
of  them,  many  a  mile  over  rough  country 
roads  and  by-ways;  and  their  attention  and 
sobriety  would  in  the  main  have  done  credit 
to  a  gathering  of  their  elders.  It  was  plain 
that  they  were  drawing  excellent  profit  from 
these  precious  days  of  the  Children's  Retreat. 

Such  a  sight  will  send  one's  thoughts  trav- 
eling, and  mine  set  forth  something  after 
this  fashion.  "What  well-behaved,  attentive, 
dutiful  little  boys  and  girls  these  seem,  to  be 
175 


Your  Neighbor  and  YOB 

sure!  Are  not  our  Catholic  country  children 
growing  more  and  more  refined  and  gentle 
year  by  year?  Surely  it  is  so  in  general,  and 
those  who  have  to  do  with  our  little  ones 
rejoice  in  the  change.  The  roughness  and 
rudeness  which  were  sometimes  so  much  in 
evidence  in  earlier  days  have  lessened  notably ; 
our  children  in  the  main  are  measurably  more 
docile,  more  courteous  and  responsive  than 
in  the  not-so-very-long-ago. 

"If  anyone  doubts  this," — so  my  medita- 
tions continued — "let  him  contrast,  for  exam- 
ple, the  country  Catechism  classes  of  to-day 
with  those  of  former  times.  True,  even  now 
we  have  our  scapegraces,  but  on  the  whole 
is  it  not  a  pleasure  rather  than  a  drudgery  to 
teach  the  little  ones  their  faith?  And  was  it 
always  so?"  And  just  here  came  a  sharp 
pang  of  a  thought  which  gave  me  woe.  "But 
then/'  said  I,  "how  sad  it  is  that  so  many  of 
these  good  little  country  children  have  so 
little  opportunity  to  learn  their  Catechism  as 
they  should  f" 

"For  however  zealous  the  parish  priest 
may  be,  the  children  often  live  miles  away, 
and  it  is  hard  to  get  them  all  together  often 
enough  to  make  Catechism  teaching  quite 
thorough  and  complete.  And  again  many  of 
176 


A  Summer  Opportunity 

our  Catholic  families  dwell  in  some  far-off 
corner  where  a  priest  comes  only  once  or 
twice  a  month."  And  then  came  the  idea! — 
a  happy  one,  I  hope,  and  surely  not  too  new 
or  strange ;  which  is  hinted  at  in  the  title 
words:  "A  Summer  Opportunity." 

Many  of  our  good  Catholic  folk,  some  men 
and  many  women,  go  a-summering  to  the 
homes  of  these  country  children  or  to  near- 
by hotels  and  cottages.  These  good  Catholic 
folk  are  sometimes  weary  and  yawn  a  little 
and  sigh  for  occupation.  Perhaps  they  love 
children,  and  talk  pleasant  nothings  to  them 
to  while  away  the  time.  What  an  opportunity 
to  teach  them  a  bit  of  Catechism,  to  gather 
a  pleasant  little  class  together,  and  win  their 
everlasting  gratitude,  if  not  here  at  least  here- 
after, by  giving  them  more  and  more  of  the 
precious  treasure  of  the  Faith !  As  a  stranger 
they  will  give  you  the  warmer  welcome,  and 
you  may  influence  them  more  perhaps  than 
do  their  elders  whom  they  see  all  the  year. 
And  if  you  can  do  only  a  little,  do  not  let 
even  a  little  part  of  such  an  opportunity 
escape  you.  It  is  only  little  in  seeming.  Who 
can  tell  what  good  one  does  when  he  teaches 
one  tiny  child  one  tiny  prayer?  "For  their 
angels  see  the  face  of  God,"  and  "whosoever 
177 


Your  Neighbor  and  You 

does  it  to  the  least  of  these  My  little  ones 
does  it  to  Me." 

One  need  not  dwell  very  much  on  so 
obvious  a  train  of  thought.  Look  up  from 
the.  page,  dear  reader,  and  let  your  own 
reflections  wander  in  this  strain.  And  indeed 
why  should  we  call  this  merely  a  summer 
opportunity?  Whenever  anyone  has  leisure 
and  can  find  a  little  child,  he  has  an*  occasion 
ready  to  his  hand,  such  as  a  Guardian  Angel 
might  sigh  for  with  desire.  There  may  be 
lads  and  lasses  near  the  door  of  your  city 
dwelling  who  are  as  much  in  need  of  religious 
teaching  from  you  as  any  country  child  that 
lives  remote  among  the  woods  and  fields. 
Alas,  the  thickets  and  wildernesses  are  not 
the  only  homes  of  ignorance!  Poor  little 
waifs  of  the  streets,  poor  little  waifs  of  our 
city  institutions !  Will  not  our  zealous 
Catholic  men  and  women  steal  the  time 
even  from  their  busy"  days  to  tell  you,  too, 
of  Jesus  and  Mary,  and  to  teach  your  yearn- 
ing little  hearts  to  love  and  seek  your  Father 
who  is  in  Heaven  ? 

The  prudent  Shepherd  of  Christendom  has 

laid  an  especial  emphasis  in  these  latter  days 

on  the  teaching  of  Catechism;  and  this  most 

wisely,  as  we  all  agree.     We  are  too  apt  to 

178 


A  Summer  Opportunity 

think  of  his  advice  as  pointing  directly  and 
almost  exclusively  to  the  appointed  guides 
and  pastors  of  the  Fold.  They  are  the  leaders 
and  the  principals  in  the  work,  to  be  sure,  but 
any  well-instructed  Catholic  may  be  their 
prized  and  helpful  adjutant  in  a  work  which 
truly  knows  no  bounds.  It  would  be  a  happy 
thing  if  every  one  of  us  were  constantly  to 
see,  in  the  need  of  our  little  ones  for  cate- 
chetl'cal  teaching,  a  golden  opportunity, — for 
Summer  in  particular,  and  then,  too,  for  all 
the  livelong  yearl 


179 


BY  THE 
SAME  AUTHOR 


A  BOOK  OF  DEVOUT 

POEMS  FOR  ALL  THE 

YEAR 


139pp.   12mo.i  GUt  Top 
PRICE    PER    COPY    $1.00 


000711  538    9 


